Opinion | What John Donne Knew About Death Can Teach Us a Lot About Life - The New York Times.
A certain amount of ease around death would have been in character. John Donne was honest about death and its place in the task of living, just as he insisted on joy. Both his life and his work tell us the same thing: It is only by keeping death nearby that one can truly live.
Running Up That Hill was the UK's song of the summer
Why you (probably) won’t finish reading this story Vox: “We live in a distracted world, almost certainly the most distracted world in human history. And if you’re part of this circus, you’re drowning in options and gadgets and screens and you’re being pulled in a million directions seemingly all at once. If you spend any time online, you already know this. You’re constantly stalked by advertisers and product peddlers, and your attention is constantly being harvested and sold. That’s the business model of Big Tech.
A new book by the British journalist Johann Hari, called Stolen Focus, takes a close look at what’s happening — and what’s happened — to our collective attention. Hari argues that we’re all becoming lost in our own lives, which feel more and more like a parade of diversions. And it seems to be getting worse and worse every year…”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Study: Walk 3,800 to 9,800 steps daily to reduce dementia risk.
FASTER, PLEASE: Researchers identify multiple causal genes that drive type 2 diabetes risk.
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOUR SHARE, COMRADE: Chinese Social Media Sites Are Quietly Putting Digital Fingerprints on Screenshots.“Some Chinese internet users recently discovered the covert watermarks on screenshots taken on Zhihu, a question-and-answer site similar to Quora. By tweaking the colors of the screenshots, the users found strings of numbers plastered across the page. Some suspect it is information that could be used to identify who took the screenshots.”
Related: White House, Big Tech colluded to censor ‘misinformation.’