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December 04, 2017

From The New Yorker:
[Because] God was a trinity, to be created in the image of God was to be created for relationships; so to make relationships the purpose of your life was to fulfill your human mission.

From The Economist:
Facebook acknowledged that before and after last year's American election, between January 2015 and August this year, 146m users may have seen Russian misinformation on its platform. Google's YouTube admitted to 1,108 Russian-linked videos and Twitter to 36,746 accounts. Far from bringing enlightenment, social media have been spreading poison.

From The TLS (Lydia Davis on Books of the Year 2017):
Climate Changed: A personal journey through the science, by Philippe Squarzoni (Abrams ComicArts; translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger), was on the reading list of a local library series here about how to help prepare our communities for the imminent future. I don’t know what to call it ­ ­– graphic non-fiction? – but it turned out to be the perfect way to present pages upon pages of hard (and hard-to-face) numbers that I would have had trouble absorbing in a denser, text-only format. The science, and the data, are clearly explained and backed up with sources. Counter-arguments by climate change doubters, and by proponents of less than radical solutions, are intelligently anticipated. The approach of the book, via a personal narrative, helps to humanize, and illuminate, the difficulty of the choices we are now faced with as individuals, living in strange times for which we have not been prepared.

From The New York Times (on Lawrence Osborne's Beautiful Animals):
On a Greek island, two wealthy young women encounter a handsome Syrian refugee, whom they endeavor to help, with disastrous results.

From The Economist:
[One] study found that users in rich countries touch their phones 2,600 times a day. 
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