Women Don’t Want to Do It, Men Don’t Have Anyone to Do It with The Blue Roof. See also.
More military personnel deployed to enforce Sydney Covid restrictions as cases surge - CNN
The Five Dimensions of Curiosity and the Four Types of Curious People
In a paper published in 2017, Todd Kashdan and his colleagues identified five distinct dimensions of curiosity. Here are the first three:
1. Joyous Exploration. This is the prototype of curiosity — the recognition and desire to seek out new knowledge and information, and the subsequent joy of learning and growing.
2. Deprivation Sensitivity. This dimension has a distinct emotional tone, with anxiety and tension being more prominent than joy — pondering abstract or complex ideas, trying to solve problems, and seeking to reduce gaps in knowledge.
3. Stress Tolerance. This dimension is about the willingness to embrace the doubt, confusion, anxiety, and other forms of distress that arise from exploring new, unexpected, complex, mysterious, or obscure events.
They also identified four types of curious people: The Fascinated, Problem Solvers, Empathizers, and Avoiders. (via the art of noticing)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Opaque to Ourselves: Milan Kundera on Writing and the Key to Great Storytelling
A torch for traversing “the territory where no one possesses the truth… but where everyone has the right to be understood.”
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man* can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But… to exist means “being-in-the-world.” Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities… [Novels] thereby make us see what we are, and what we are capable of.
Looking closely at dang near anything might very well be the key to it all.1With that in mind, I’ve been trying to get better at this, this deceptively simple act of looking closer.
By dint of pandemic stasis, I suspect we’ve all gotten better at closer looking. Perhaps you’ve noticed the subtle slant of the floor of the room in which you’ve been stuck for months on end, or the daily rhythms of that one old dude on your neighborhood block that you’ve now walked around a million times. Maybe you noticed how exhausted you are by video calls, but in noticing that you recognized that it’s really the audio delays and wonky noise cancellation that makes video so stressful.2 Perhaps you noticed how different countries handled the pandemic (how could you not), and from that you recognized the flaws and strengths of the varied responses, and in that the cracks in social systems that we hitherto took for granted.
The point being: Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.
How Directors Shoot Films at Three Different Budget Levels
The YouTube channel In Depth Cine has been looking at how directors like Spike Lee, Alfonso Cuarón, Martin Scorsese, and Wes Anderson shoot films at three different budget levels, from the on-a-shoestring films early in their careers to later blockbusters, to see the similarities and differences in their approaches. For instance, Wes Anderson made Bottle Rocket for $5 million, Rushmore for $10 million, and Grand Budapest Hotel for $25 million:
Steven Spielberg shot Duel for $450,000, Raiders of the Lost Ark for $20 million, and Saving Private Ryan for $70 million:
Christopher Nolan did Following for $6,000, Memento for $9 million, and Inception for $160 million:
You can find the full playlist of 3 Budget Levels videos here. (This list really needs some female directors — Ava DuVernay, Sofia Coppola, and Kathryn Bigelow would be easy to do, for starters. And Chloé Zhao, after The Eternals gets released