Skip to main content

November 27, 2017

From The New York Times (Anthony Bourdain on "What’s the last great book you read?"):
Truly great? Charles Portis’s “True Grit” is a masterpiece. Don’t settle for seeing the film versions. One of the great heroines of all time and a magnificent book filled with great dialogue.

From The New York Times (Anthony Bourdain on "Whose writing today most inspires you?"):
Donald Ray Pollock was a revelation when I first read “The Devil All the Time.” Daniel Woodrell’s work. Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings” was incredible. Lydia Lunch takes no prisoners … ever. I’m inspired by her utter fearlessness. William T. Vollmann is intimidating in his sheer volume and courage and ambition. But when I find myself in a hole writing? I always go back to Elmore Leonard, he was a professional. And Edward St. Aubyn. His writing thrills me.

From The New Yorker:
[Of] white people who still lived in their childhood home town, nearly sixty per cent supported Trump; of those who lived within a two-hour drive of their home town, fifty per cent supported him; of those who had moved more than two hours from where they grew up, forty per cent.

From The Economist:
Amazon’s biggest impact is still in e-commerce. In America it accounted for more than half the growth in online spending last year. More searches for products begin on Amazon than on Google.

From The TLS (William Boyd on Books of the Year 2017):
When I was at university trying to earn a bit of extra cash one of the strangest jobs I had was to read Joseph Conrad’s Victory out loud to a blind Italian boy. Two hours a day, five days a week. He would frequently stop me reading so he could type notes into his braille typewriter. Consequently we managed about three pages of the novel a day and it took about six weeks to read the whole thing. This surreal, enervating experience put me off Conrad for years, though I’ve slowly been reassimilating myself, particularly enjoying The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, perhaps the first true spy novels. This process has been hugely encouraged by Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a global world (William Collins). Lucid, revelatory and wonderfully concise, The Dawn Watch celebrates Conrad’s uncanny prescience and shows his continued relevance now in the twenty-first century.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 24, 2018

From The New York Times : We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (whic...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 26, 2018

From The Economist : An equity is a claim on the assets and the profits of a firm; a bond entitles the investor to a series of interest payments and repayment on maturity. Bitcoin brings no cashflows to the owner; the only return will come via a rise in price. When there is no obvious way of valuing an asset, it is hard to say that one target price is less likely than another. Bitcoin could be worth $10 or $100,000. One argument made by bitcoinnoisseurs is that it is a type of “digital gold”. Stores of value are supposed to keep their value; bitcoin, by contrast, is extremely volatile. Its code ensures that no more than 21m coins can ever be created; that sets bitcoin apart from fiat money, which central banks can create at will. Yet being limited in supply is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having value; signed photographs of Economist journalists are rare but, sadly, of negligible worth. Nor is supply really limited. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies exist. If the...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 27, 2018

From The New York Times : [Steven] Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all. Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent. There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent. Poverty has been transformed by falling prices and government support. “When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the...
Post a Comment
Read more