An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery Atlantic
Ireland as literary powerhouse
“Recused” NACC boss Brereton at Robodebt meeting
Does Ozempic Burn Fat or Just Reduce Appetite? A New Study Offers a Clue Gizmodo
In no other OECD country do workers spend less time on the job. With labour input shrinking by some 1 per cent a year, labour productivity would need to rise by an equal amount for the economy to stand still. Unfortunately, productivity increases per hour worked have stood well below 1 per cent in recent years. The country’s fundamental speed limit for growth may lie below zero.
That is from Moritz Kraemer in the FT
Michael H. Kater, After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany. Another excellent work. From this book I took away the (unintended?) conclusion that the German written and cinematic contributions have not aged well, due to excessive (but understandable) preoccupations with Naziism and the Second World War. The greatest German postwar cultural contributions in fact are Richter, Beuys, Kiefer, Baselitz, Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, and Can. The less literal artistic forms dealt with the war obsession in more effective and lasting ways, noting that some Kiefer works still have this problem.
Self-recommending is Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment, and Other Essays. The essays on Frost, Auden, and Bradbury are some of my favorites.
Jordan Ott’s Back to the Future: How to Reignite American Innovation is exactly that.
Speaking of Kraftwerk, I also enjoyed the new Simon Reynolds book Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today Reynolds is very good at covering parts of music history that other people ignore
Don’t trust Google for customer service numbers. It might be a scam
Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “Scams just keep popping up when you Google. On Monday, I found what appeared to be impostors of customer service for Delta and Coinbase, the cryptocurrency company, in the “People also ask” section high up in Google.
A group of people experienced in Google’s intricacies also said this week that it took about 22 minutes to fool Google into highlighting a bogus business phone number in a prominent spot in search results. This fits a persistent pattern of bad guys finding ways to trick Google into showing scammers’ numbers for airlines, hotels, local repair companies, banksor other businesses. The toll can be devastating when people are duped by these bogus business numbers.
Fortune recently reported on a man who called what a Google listing said was Coinbase customer support, and instead it was an impostor who Fortune said tricked the man and stole $100,000. Scammers impersonate businesses and government agencies all over the internet.
But Google search is unique as the planet’s most widely used online service and the front door to the world’s information. Most of the time, you will find correct customer service numbers by Googling. But the company doesn’t say how often people are tricked out of time and money by bogus listings — nor why Google can’t stop the scams from recurring…”