Sunday, August 15, 2021

WHAT DO YOU READ WHEN THE WORLD IS FALLING APART? SPY FICTION, OF COURSE

 WHAT DO YOU READ WHEN THE WORLD IS FALLING APART? SPY FICTION, OF COURSE. Crime Reads



Mashable: “Great literature is closer than you think, and you don’t even need10 free audiobook sites for discovering your next literary obsession - Mashable to visit a bookstore or pick up your e-reader to find it. If you haven’t got time to sit down with a book — or if you just like being read to — check out one of these sites, which allow access to thousands of free audiobooks. There’s the perfect one for you in the mix! ..”



"Writing didn't serve the purpose I wanted it to, which was to fix the fundamentally broken relationship between myself and other people. Reading – slowly, over decades – did."


Fornicating Under Consent of King Literary Review


In the midst of millenarian chaos, the charismatic presence of Akbar – the perfect ruler Scroll


America needs to listen to the anguished operators of our flying death robots | Will Bunch Philadelphia Inquirer



Researchers announce the smallest exoplanet discovered yet Ars Technica


New York City’s beloved barred owl dies after being struck by Central Park maintenance vehicle CBS


The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done Oliver Burkeman


The Silver Age of Essays The Paris Review


Napoleon Bonaparte, gardener? Yes, says a new book, the dictator found solace in the natural world WaPo


100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation



In an excerpt from his new book This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan writes about caffeine, a performance enhancing drug that humans seemingly cannot get enough of.

Cognitive psychologists sometimes talk in terms of two distinct types of consciousness: spotlight consciousness, which illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning, and lantern consciousness, in which attention is less focused yet illuminates a broader field of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do many people on psychedelics. This more diffuse form of attention lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections — all of which can nourish creativity. By comparison, caffeine’s big contribution to human progress has been to intensify spotlight consciousness — the focused, linear, abstract and efficient cognitive processing more closely associated with mental work than play. This, more than anything else, is what made caffeine the perfect drug not only for the age of reason and the Enlightenment, but for the rise of capitalism, too.

The power of caffeine to keep us awake and alert, to stem the natural tide of exhaustion, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology and so, along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work.

I particularly enjoyed — and by enjoyed I mean “found uncomfortably true” — this line:

Daily, caffeine proposes itself as the optimal solution to the problem caffeine creates.

For more information on how caffeine enabled the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, check out Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses.