Can chess making a gripping film? Watch Walter Tevis’s “Queen’s Gambit”

 

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.

— Denise Levertov, born in 1923

Three Extraordinary Memoir Writers On The Art Of Memoir

Laymon: “That word memoir, in some way it distracted me from the hard shit that I was writing. … Having the memoir title helped me sort of get through the heart work, in this fucked up way.”  – LitHub

Kevin on Inspirational Leadership with Jonathan Bowman-Perks  

 It's not evil that's ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

— Ned Rorem, born in 1923

I did not imagine I would be so enthralled by a show about a young woman playing chess in the 1960s. But that woman is Anya Taylor-Joy, who has been fantastic in everything I’ve seen her in since The Witch (I uh, skipped New Mutants), and the story is based on a book by Walter Tevis, a fantastic author.

Queen’s Gambit is indeed great on its own merits. It’s a smart, well-told story and Taylor-Joy is fantastic as Beth Harmon, a chess prodigy who learns to play from the janitor in her orphanage and takes those skills all the way to Moscow to play the world’s best Grandmaster by the time she’s 20. This, sadly, is not a true story, but it’s a great one all the same.

Queens Gambit - The Chess Website

Queens Gambit. The Queen's Gambit is probably the most popular gambit and although most gambits are said to be unsound against perfect

The Queen's Gambit Season 2 News, Cast, Rumors

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The Queen's Gambit is billed as a limited series, so it's no 

Can chess making a gripping film? Watch Walter Tevis’s “Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix this Friday, October 23. 

'The Queen’s Gambit': The True Story, Explained

Anya Taylor-Joy stars in the new Netflix miniseries about a chess prodigy.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

— Doris Lessing, born in 1919

Xi Jinping says China ‘determined to defeat invaders’ in Korean war anniversary speechSouth China Morning Post

OpenStack at 10 years old: A failure on its own terms, a success in its own niche The Register. Read all the way to the end. 

US to host Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict talks FT

Kyrgyzstan Sets New Polls as New PM Reassures Russia Agence France Presss

Battle for borshch: Ukraine lays claim to soup dish amid identity war with Russia The Atlantic Council. Now they’re just trolling us

Why the urban poor will be forced to leave big cities FT

 

Without a ‘Right to Garden’ Law, It May Be Illegal to Grow Your Own Food Civil Eats

Hold Your Lugnuts: A Right to Repair Automotive Opera in Seven Scenes Dig Boston. Right-to-repair is covered regularly at NC. See, e.g., here, here, here, and here

Evolutionary Psychology: Predictively Powerful or Riddled with Just-So Stories? Areo

For vampire bats, social distancing while sick comes naturally ScienceDaily 

Sharks Wash Up on Beaches, Stabbed by SwordfishNew York Times 

Secrets of Math From the Bee Whisperer Quanta 

Giant Asteroid Survivor of Failed Planet Discovered to Be Slowly Rusting in Space ScienceAlert 

‘Sleeping giant’ Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find Guardian 

Le Testament Français by Andreï Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan

Le Testament Français was published in the US as Dreams of My Russian Summers, but UK publishers retained its French title even in translated editions.  It was the first book ever to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, and it became a bestseller in France and elsewhere.  I picked it up from Brotherhood Books in 2014 because in my 2011-2012 Year of Russian Reading I’d read Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man (La vie d’un homme inconnu).  And so I knew Le Testament Français would be a fine book, and it is. As the blurb on the back of this edition says:

Once in a while, there comes a book that captivates critics and public alike.  Andreï Makine’s autobiographical novel is such a book… Its subtle blend of memory and imagination is reminiscent of Proust… But in its broad sweep and mystical vision, Le Testament Français belongs to the tradition of the 19th century Russian novelists.  (Independent on Sunday, date & reviewer’s name not provided).

Famously, Makine was born in Russia in 1957, fled the Soviet Union for France in 1987, where he slept rough for a while and struggled to have his writing accepted as authentic because publishers thought a Russian couldn’t possibly write so well in French.  Since they didn’t think it was his own work, he pretended to have translated it, and that’s how this beautiful novel eventually came to be published

Wickenby - Jersey/Swiss Financial Services Firm Admits to Conspiring with U.S. Taxpayers to Hide Assets and Income in Offshore Accounts Strachans SA in Liquidation Pleads Guilty

Taxation in the evolving post-COVID world: Jeremy Hirschhorn

4.45pm to 5.20pm: Tax Practitioners Board: Current Focus

• Code of Conduct
• Compliance focus
• New developments

Presented by Michael O’Neill, Secretary and CEO, Tax Practitioners Board

The Australian Tax Office has warned companies not to use loopholes to exploit more than $30bn of business tax concessions including instant expensing and loss carryback provisions.

In a speech on Thursday the ATO’s second commissioner for client engagement, Jeremy Hirschhorn, scolded companies for using jobkeeper wage subsidies to pay dividends and urged them not to use “artificial mechanisms” to exploit the measures contained in the 2020 budget.

Hirschhorn told a Chief Financial Officer Live event businesses should use concessions to invest rather than buy assets “not actually used in your business”, raising the alarm about practices like purchasing a company car in fact used as a personal vehicle.

ATO warns businesses not to use loopholes to exploit $30bn Covid tax concessions

"Your alarm bells should ring loudest when the 'clever' adviser tells you that your tax manager is too conservative or (particularly dangerous) they bring a tax-driven transaction to you supported by a suite of potential commercial rationales for the transaction."

He also warns companies to come forward for a non-binding ruling when they are in doubt over a tax arrangement.

"It still surprises me how many large companies rely on an adviser’s 'more likely than not', 'reasonably arguable' or 'should' opinion ... on their tax infrastructure (which at most only provides penalty protection if it all goes wrong)," he will say. 

JobKeeper should not be funding executive bonuses: ATO 

Simon Steward was the first graduate of his Melbourne University law class to become a senior or queen's counsel. He will now be the first to join the High Court.

He's the smartest lawyer I've ever met'

The Australian Taxation Office has sent out 350,000 emails, creating a nightmare tax crunch for cryptocurrency users with oustanding taxes from 2017. CryptoTaxCalculator, an Australian made crypto tax software company, has recently partnered with one of Australia's leading cryptocurrency exchanges, CoinSpot, to make it easier for users to organise their taxes. CryptoTaxCalculator has seen exponential growth in new users since the ATO emails

DID THE ECONOMIST AID A CHINESE COMMUNIST INFLUENCE OPERATION?:

On Oct. 26, the Washington Free Beacon published a hard-hitting investigative article exposing a truly appalling and destructive example of communist China’s long-term war on free societies, in this case using influence and information as weapons.

More:

The Free Beacon’s bottom-line accusation: Chinese money bought advantageous (euphemized) treatment, if not favorable news coverage and a positive editorial attitude in a news and business journal long regarded as one of the world’s most influential — influential in terms of its editorial acumen, erudite reporting and savvy story selection. The Economist’s international subscriber base is well educated, wealthy and connected.

It appears the CCP managed to influence The Economist’s purveyors of influence and did so not in one or two instances but for eight critical years. The CCP wasn’t simply targeting The Economist. Huawei has tried to coopt media everywhere. But The Economist allegedly influences the influencers in capital cities around the planet, which gives it unique leverage.

An even bigger bottom line:

From the Chinese perspective, Hunter Biden’s alleged business deals in China would classify as an effort to influence an individual leader.

 THEY’RE IN EVERYTHING:  Communist China Runs Your Bookstore and WorldCon too.

Department emails tried to discourage evidence from staffer who shredded documents

New York 2140 - Remote Sympathy

 Many moons I have lived

My body’s weathered and worn

Ask yourself how old you’d be

If you didn’t know the day you were born.

 

Try to love on your wife

And stay close to your friends

Toast each sundown with wine

Don’t let the Old Man in.

 

(Thank you Toby Keith, Willie Nelson and Clint Eastwood.)

Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson Jacobin. I quite liked New York 2140

The Obligation of Self-Discovery Boston Review. Simone de Beauvoir.

 

No Matter Who Wins, The War Machine WinsCaitlin Johnstone

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Big Tech CEOs Grilled by Senate About Free Speech and Censorship but Will Anything Change? “The three CEOs — Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai — all appeared before the committee voluntarily. That’s probably because they feel largely untouchable at the moment. They’re no doubt hoping that Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep gets elected and the Democrats take over the Senate, Should that happen, the very behavior that prompted yesterday’s hearing will be rewarded by the Dems.”

Using the Life Cycle of Media Manipulation, each case study features a chronological description of a media manipulation event, which is filtered along specific variables such as tactics, targets, mitigation, outcomes, and keywords…Led by Joan Donovan, PhD, the Technology and Social Change project (TaSC) is a team of interdisciplinary researchers analyzing how contemporary technologies of communication are used by different groups to bring about social change, for better or worse. The Media Manipulation Casebook is a research platform that advances knowledge of misinformation and disinformation and their threats to democracy, public health, and security. The Casebook is a new resource for building the field of Critical Internet Studies by equipping researchers with case studies, theory, methods, and frameworks to analyze the interplay of media ecosystems, technology, politics, and society…”

BossKeeper: how JobKeeper lined the pockets of top ASX directors, executives and shareholders

by Tasha May | Oct 25, 2020 | Economy & Markets

New Zealand and the US compile public registers to ensure their Jobkeeper-type subisidies are not rorted by businesses. But no such transparency for Australians. As the Government singles out bureaucrats such as Australia Post chief Christine Holgate for corporate excesses, Tasha May shines the torch on pandemic rorting at the top end of town.

Murder, corruption, bombings – the company at centre of Australia’s submarine deal

by Michelle Fahy | Oct 24, 2020 | Government

The arms company at the centre of a deadly criminal saga and numerous global corruption scandals, Naval Group, was selected by the Australian government to build our new fleet of submarines – a deal heralded as ‘one of the world’s most lucrative defence contracts’. How did this happen? In this special investigation Michelle Fahy discovers significant gaps in anti-bribery and corruption measures

Atomic - The Redfern brewpub designed with a distinctly retro-futuristic vibe

Ghosts Who Walk Among Us:

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

— John Berryman, born in 1914

Detained Chinese Poet 'Under Pressure to Confess' in Yunnan

As the Hong Kong protester put it, “Don’t trust China … China is asshole.”

Ghosts Who Walk Among Us: The Millions Interviews Claire Cronin - The Millions

While working on the book over several years, I also became more attuned to uncanny experiences and weird synchronicities. By the time I finished it, I found I was more of a believer in the mysterious and supernatural than when I began, which was not the outcome I expected.

I think my experience of the spiritual world has always been one of awe, fear, and dread: the “tremendum” in Rudolf Ottos’s definition of the numinous as “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” It wasn’t ghosts and demons that most frightened me while writing; I was haunted by God.

 

Dhammika Dharmapala (Chicago) presents Do Multinational Firms Use Tax Havens to the Detriment of Other Countries? virtually today at Loyola-L.A. as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium Series hosted by Katie Pratt and Ted Seto

WSJ.com [includes a 4.24 min video which is free to watch] – Mathematicians are teaming up with political scientists to create models of how social media divides us, and results suggest at least one popular solution might actually make the problem worse. “Americans are more polarized than ever—at least by some measures. A growing body of research suggests that social media is accelerating the trend, and many political scientists worry it’s tearing our country apart. It isn’t clear how to solve the problem. And new research suggests that one often-proposed solution—exposing users on the platforms to more content from the other side—might actually be making things worse, because of how social media amplifies extreme opinions. With an election looming, Congressional investigations highlighting the far-reaching power of Facebook and Google over what we see and hear, and long-term trends in polarization pointing toward an ever-more-fractured America, the question of what role social-media giants play in dividing or uniting us has taken on new urgency, says Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology at Duke University who studies the impact of social media on polarization. If social media seems particularly infuriating lately, it’s possible that it’s as much about the way it shapes our perception of what’s going on as it is about the reality of the viewpoints and behavior of our fellow Americans. It’s also possible that highly partisan media—something that was common at the birth of our nation but which the U.S. had a relative respite from during the age of broadcast media—is an unavoidable consequence of America’s foundational right to free expression. Technology only magnifies this natural effect of democracy. One of the challenges of studying polarization is defining polarization…”

See also Why Social Media Makes Us More Polarized and How to Fix It – Research shows it’s the influencers, not the networks themselves, that amplify differences between us.

Starlings in the Scottish skies Reuters A murmuration.

Rescued endangered Loa water frogs have 200 offspring BBC

How The Bankruptcy Code Protects Lenders And Harms Student Debtors — And What One Lawyer Is Doing About It Above the Law

Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications International Monetary Fund

Goldman Sachs: suppliers of corruption services

Posted on October 23 2020

Need I say more than this? I defined the suppliers of corruption services way back in 2007 as: 1. Those governments who supply the secrecy
Read the full article…

Liberty Doesn’t Mean Freedom to Infect Other People”

Coronavirus: Slovakia holds national test but president calls for delay BBC

Andrew Imrich - Spišský emeritný biskup je pozitívny na COVID-19, nakazený je aj rektor seminára aj 15 seminaristov

Spišský emeritný biskup Andrej Imrich.Foto: archívne, SITA/Tomáš Benedikovič

What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

“Our boyfriends, our significant others, and our husbands are supposed to be No. 1. Our worlds are backward.”

This article about the role of close friendships in a society that privileges romantic relationships is worth a read. "When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable."

David Fincher says there probably won't be a 3rd season of the excellent Mindhunter series. The show is too expensive and viewership is not high enough to support it.

Premier's office provided a list of grants to approve, despite saying she's not responsible

Covid-19 is so bad in the US right now that even Vermont is heading in the wrong direction (indoor wedding, hockey facility outbreak, now both spreading in schools and homes).

“Liberty Doesn’t Mean Freedom to Infect Other People”

Prague: Fantastic 3-D Animation of How Medieval Bridges Were Built

Artist Ed Fairrburn draws portraits of people and objects on top of maps and, well, it is just my exact cup of tea. His newest stuff is available on Instagram. I’ve featured his work twice before and it won’t be the last. 

Archie Rose