Sunday, June 02, 2019

Elena Ferrante: Storytelling Has Been Wrested From Men, And Its Power Now Rests In Women’s Hands



“Meanwhile, if these hours be dark, as indeed in many ways they are, at least do not let us sit deedless, like fools and fine gentlemen, thinking the common toil not good enough for us, and beaten by the muddle; but rather let us work like good fellows trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against to-morrow’s day-light—that to-morrow, when the civilised world, no longer greedy, strifeful, and destructive, shall have a new art, a glorious art, made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user.”
William Morris, The Art of the People

Huskisson seawater is filled with WobbeGongs this morning 


My life with George: How Luke Davies went from broke to Clooney's Catch-22



 "Review: 'Fleabag,' Biting, Bitter and Pushing Boundaries"The New York Times



Elena Ferrante: Storytelling Has Been Wrested From Men, And Its Power Now Rests In Women’s Hands



Ferrante: “I chose to write out of a fear of handling more concrete and dangerous forms of power. And also perhaps out of a strong feeling of alienation from the techniques of domination, so that at times writing seemed to be the most congenial way for me to react to abuses of power.” – The New York Times 

Reagan Ray has collected a bunch of classic logos from American airlines, from the big ones (Delta, United) to small regional airlines (Pennsylvania Central, Cardiff and Peacock) to those no longer with us (Pan Am, TWA, Northwest). I sent him the logo for my dad’s old airline, Blue Line Air Express…I hope it makes it in!

Imagine writing a masterpiece and never getting to see it in print. Such was the fate of Vasily Grossman 

See also Reagan’s collections of record label logos80s action figure logos,American car logosVHS distributor logos, and railway logos. Careful, you might spend all day on these… (via @mrgan)


The New York Times – “A letter written by Alexander Hamilton during the Revolutionary War has resurfaced more than seven decades after the document was stolen from the Massachusetts Archives, federal authorities said. The 1780 letter, addressed to Hamilton’s good friend the Marquis de Lafayette, came to light last November when an auction house in Virginia notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation after a South Carolina family tried to consign it for auction, according to a complaint filed Wednesday in Federal District Court in Massachusetts by the United States District Attorney’s Office. An auction house researcher had discovered that the letter matched a copy of the correspondence on Founders Online, a National Archives and Records Administration website. It had been listed as missing…”


SEmily Satterthwaite (Toronto), Rewarding Honest Taxpayers: An Experimental Assessment, 22 Fla. Tax Rev. 200 (2019):
Shrinking budgetary allocations for tax enforcement at the U.S. federal level have placed an unprecedented premium on low-cost policies that promote voluntary tax compliance. In other jurisdictions, tax administrators have experimented with rewarding taxpayers for voluntarily complying with tax laws, but there has been an absence of reward-focused policy experimentation in the United States. To explore the efficacy of rewards among U.S. taxpayer populations, a multi-period online tax reporting experiment was conducted featuring a simple reward intervention: a token monetary amount pre-announced and provided to participants who were audited and found to have fully complied. The reward failed to increase average post-audit compliance levels as compared to the no-reward control condition, regardless of whether random audits or non-random (i.e., conditional on past detected evasion) audits were used. However, the reward treatment condition in combination with random audits was strikingly effective with respect to an alternative measure of tax compliance: “consistent compliance,” or the outcome in which a participant voluntarily reports all of her income in each and every period of the experiment.