- Lunchtime Observations
“It’s always best to leave
No glitches in the plot;
Sailors tell you that the yarn
Is weakest at the knot.”
See What The Sydney Opera House Would Have Looked Like If They’d Chosen A Different Architect
The Heraldoffers visualizations, in situ on the tiny peninsula in Sydney Harbor, of half a dozen of the runners-up in the competition to design what was meant to be Australia’s new national opera house. (Personally, we think the panel made the right choice.) – Sydney Morning Herald
- That’s the art every first-rate actor and comedian masters. I think of Jack Benny – commonplaces delivered exquisitely. Waugh's diary entry for June 29, 1956 is cool and dry: “Early Mass. Then to Max Beerbohm’s funeral in St Paul’s. Ill attended. Lunched at Ritz with Teresa and Osbert Lancaster – raw steak.”
'A Genius of the Purest Kind'
Of all the masters of English prose, we have the most to learn from Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh. From Beerbohm we can learn how to nuance irony, not lay it on thick with a putty knife. He can teach us how to be amusing without telling jokes or taking the lazy way and merely being outrageous. Waugh, whose best books are peppered with jokes and outrage, once described Beerbohm’s company as “blissikins.” Waugh was a dedicated craftsman of language, a gift rare even among poets. In his maturity he was no aesthete, but the beauty and hard exactitude of his words never cancelled each other out.
Has the internet made us collectively lose our minds? Patricia Lockwood looks at our tweets and gifs and wonders what the absurd avalanche of details was for - our stories
Andy Warhol emerged from the commercial ooze, confining himself largely to the surface of life. Yet his gifts were substantial, especially his ability to make synthetic, mechanized art feel authentic Warhola -Slavic Andrej
My neighbor just let himself into my locked house… thanks Siri Reddit
Knowable Magazine
Shane Parrish – Farnam Street – The Dying Art of Conversation: My Interview with Author and Speaker Celeste Headlee [The Knowledge Project Ep. #51 – Podcast] “Speaker, author and radio journalist Celeste Headlee has had decades of experience fine tuning the recipe for engaging and rewarding conversation. She shares some tips to help us instantly improve our conversational skills and meaningfully connect with others.”
Study links heavily processed foods to risk of earlier death Guardian
Black leopard spotted in Africa for first time in 100 years National Geographic
Knowable Magazine
Shane Parrish – Farnam Street – The Dying Art of Conversation: My Interview with Author and Speaker Celeste Headlee [The Knowledge Project Ep. #51 – Podcast] “Speaker, author and radio journalist Celeste Headlee has had decades of experience fine tuning the recipe for engaging and rewarding conversation. She shares some tips to help us instantly improve our conversational skills and meaningfully connect with others.”
Study links heavily processed foods to risk of earlier death Guardian
Here we analyse more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014, and demonstrate that across this period smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones.That is from a new Nature paper by Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James A. Evans. Here is the NYT write-up by Benedict Carey.
Black leopard spotted in Africa for first time in 100 years National Geographic
'Killing live music in NSW': Industry slams Berejiklian government
Music
heavyweights Bernard Fanning, Vance Joy and leading promoter Michael
Chugg have warned that the state government is forcing music out of NSW.
El Chapo escaped two prisons in Mexico, but no one's ever busted out of 'the ADX'
"For
him to escape, he would have to have a warden in his pocket," one
retired corrections officer said. "No one moves there without permission
at all."
