Saturday, July 24, 2021

How Internet and TV providers get away with jacking up your bill

   

The History of the Dot Com Era


     New edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy 


       Just over twenty years ago, Nick Lezard wrote in The Guardian:
Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy survives among the cognoscenti, but there's no Penguin Classic of the book, and it would be difficult to see how there could be.
       Just over a year later the New York Review Books Classics one-volume paperback edition came out, and I can attest to its popularity: no book has been as much-bought via the Amazon-links at complete review over the years. Penguin Classics has now caught up: a hardcover edition, edited by Angus Gowland, is due out shortly (pre-order your copy at Amazon.co.uk), with a paperback edition to follow in a year. 
       In The Observer Donna Ferguson reports, in ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’: secrets of 400-year-old self-help book unlocked that: "The Anatomy of Melancholy has at last been demystified", as:
Dr Angus Gowland of University College London told the Observer there are now only nine known mysteries and riddles of the text left to solve.
       It almost makes me want to stick with my three-(pocket-sized-)volume 1961 Everyman's Library edition ..... 

       As noted in my review, if, for some outrageous reason, I ever had to trim my library down to a small number of volumes, that number would have to be very, very small indeed before I would even consider going without The Anatomy of Melancholy; I suspect even with a desert-island-list-type limit of five books it would be among them. 



The Brains Blog

How Internet and TV providers get away with jacking up your bill  Washington Post – “Service providers use their lock on neighborhoods — and a lack of rules — to take advantage of us. Here’s how to spot their tricks…Across many American communities, one or two companies controlhow we get online — and treat us like captives. They obscure the truth on their bills. And when we don’t know what we’re paying for, we end up getting fleeced…And most of all, they push us onto packages with limited-time pricing that rises dramatically if you don’t remember to call up and threaten to quit. (If you need help lowering your bill, I wrote this guide with five tips.)…”

How to Protest Without Sacrificing Your Digital Privacy

Vice – “How to keep your digital devices and accounts safe when exercising your right to peaceably assemble…”


VIDEO: Watch the Music Video That Inspired the Cuban Uprising


Mark Humphries, The Spike: A Journey Through The Brain in 2.1 Seconds (Princeton, 2021)


Grace Lindsay, Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain(Bloomsbury, 2021)


Caitlin O’Connor and James Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread(Yale, 2018)



The local reporter who broke the Nikole Hannah-Jones/UNC story also got her latest exclusive