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Michelle Alexander reminded us recently: “The whole of American history can be described as a struggle between those who truly embraced the revolutionary idea of freedom, equality and justice for all, and those who resisted.” She argues that we are not the resistance; we are the river that they are trying to dam; they are the resistance, the minority, the people trying to stop the flow of history.

It doesn’t feel like I’m overeating when I set off on a book binge. A more accurate sensation might be that of chain-smoking. As anyone knows who’s practiced the glamorous art of smoking cigarettes, the trick with chain smoking is to light the next cigarette off the dregs of the previous one, thereby executing an unending continuation of the smoking experience—death risk, smelly jackets, lipstick stains on foam filters and all. A chain-smoking session when done properly, unbroken, can extend time and space in either direction. If you’re at a bar or a club (and it’s the ’90s) and you’re trying to maintain the energy of the night, chain smoking can keep your pulse racing. If you meet a new, cute person and the two of you stay up until the sun rises, chain-smoking can extend the moment. Or it can slow things down, like a well-earned break from work in which all you are required to do is breathe, deeply, over and over. It’s the latter sensation I feel most keenly when bingeing, whether movies or TV or cupcakes: the literal and metaphorical deep breaths; a time-out from the mundanity of the regular tasks of living.

Reading Isn’t a Sprint, It’s a Marathon

https://review.oysterbooks.com/p/NhDRop7ZivkP3Jy5hFoD68/reading-isnt-a-sprint-its-a-marathon

“Our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.” You’re Descended from Royalty and So Is Everybody Else - Issue 56: Perspective - Nautilus http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/youre-descended-from-royalty-and-so-is-everybody-else via Instapaper Because Mathematics 🤪

“anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.” - Neil Postman

https://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Criticisms/informing_ourselves_to_death.paper via Instapaper

“In her comparative study of fallen empires, Jacobs identifies common early indicators of decline: “cultural xenophobia,” “self-imposed isolation,” and “a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit … to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” She warns of the profligate use of plausible denial in American politics, the idea that “a presentable image makes substance immaterial,” allowing political campaigns “to construct new reality.””

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-prophecies-of-jane-jacobs/501104/ via Instapaper

As for Trump’s uncivil speech—the insults, the petty meanness, the crudeness, the talk about hand size, the assurance, on national TV, that his would-be Presidential dick is up to the job, his mastery of the jaw-droppingly untrue personal smear (Obama is Kenyan, Ted Cruz’s dad was in cahoots with Lee Harvey Oswald, U.S. Muslims knew what was “going on” pre-Orlando), which he often dishonorably eases into the world by attaching some form of the phrase “many people have said this” (The world is flat; many people have said this. People are saying that birds can play the cello: we need to look into that)—his supporters seem constitutionally reluctant to object, as if the act of objecting would mark them as fatally delicate. Objecting to this sort of thing is for the coddled, the liberal, the élite. “Yeah, he can really improve, in the way he says things,” one woman in Fountain Hills tells me. “But who gives a shit? Because if he’s going to get the job done? I’m just saying. You can’t let your feelings get hurt. It’s kind of like, get over it, you know what I mean? What’s the big picture here? The big picture is we’ve got to get America back on track.”

Ahem. “The neuroscientists are saying, “We don’t need to invoke those kind of quantum processes, we don’t need quantum wave functions collapsing inside neurons, we can just use classical physics to describe processes in the brain.” I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects—including brains—don’t exist. So this is a far more radical claim about the nature of reality and does not involve the brain pulling off some tricky quantum computation. So even Penrose hasn’t taken it far enough. But most of us, you know, we’re born realists. We’re born physicalists. This is a really, really hard one to let go of.” The Case Against Reality http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/ via Instapaper

“But, since epistemologists like Lynch insist echo chambers have degraded knowledge, we have to ask what our media diet consisted of before the net. The answer isn’t pretty: Three channels of nightly news; a small handful of newspapers in major cities; a nice spread of national magazines, each one its own echo chamber; a Great Books series launched in 1952 that consisted of works by 130 authors, not one of whom was a woman or black, and almost all of whom were within the European tradition.” Rethinking Knowledge in the Internet Age - Los Angeles Review of Books https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rethinking-knowledge-internet-age/ via Instapaper

“A meeting is dropped mysteriously onto our calendars, and at the designated time we shuffle warily into a conference room. The last time this happened, we were given forms that asked us to rate various values on a scale of 1 to 5: our desire to lead a team; the importance of work-life balance. I gave both things a 4 and was told I didn’t want it enough.” Uncanny Valley https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/ via Instapaper

"Two brilliant women, speaking French, smoking French cigarettes, discussing French film. Conclusion: the way they looked was … a look. A deliberate, carefully devised look. It struck me that I’d seen this look not two weeks before. It was in a movie: Jean Cocteau’s Orpheé. It was the look of the oh-so-sophisticated female students the hero meets at the café. And didn’t the dark woman who played the figure of Death in the film affect much the same austere appearance? What a dope I was! What I’d ignorantly mistaken for a drab and sexless absence of style was—so I decided that evening on the basis of no greater evidence than what I could see at the far end of the table—the look of French female intellect. These were women of ideas for whom life (and doubtless love) were far too serious, too existentially serious (I had lately learned the word in Philosophy 101) to allow them to waste time on frivolities like lipstick, nylons, underwear." from "Flicker: A Novel (Rediscovered Classics)" by Theodore Roszak

"Still I must be grateful, knowing that the awkward desire these few fleeting moments of cinematic seduction quickened in me was the first early-morning glimmer of adulthood. Through them, I was learning the difference between the sexual and the sensual. Sex, after all, is a spontaneous appetite; it bubbles up from the adolescent juices of the body without shape or style." from "Flicker: A Novel (Rediscovered Classics)" by Theodore Roszak

The Information by James Gleick - the persistence of the word (p30)

How does this contrast with skills required to participate in these markets. Having less capital means that you will have less support from the "professionals" “The accredited investor rule has mostly been ignored by scholars of inequality. But legal scholars Houman Shadab, Usha Rodrigues, and Cary Martin Shelby are an exception. They have each written persuasively about how the rules contribute to inequality by giving the richest investors privileged access to the best investment strategies. Shadab points out that other countries (with less inequality) allow retail investors to access hedge funds. The law has also inflated the compensation of hedge fund workers—roughly $500,000 on average—by restricting competition.” Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2016/03/25-make-elites-compete-why-one-percent-earn-so-much-rothwell via Instapaper

“[G]entrification and exclusion are intimately related at a neighborhood level. If a high-demand, high-cost neighborhood won’t build, developers and people looking for housing will be diverted to the nearest low-cost neighborhoods. That increases demand and development and leads to gentrification.” What's Really to Blame for San Francisco's Housing Crisis http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/03/are-wealthy-neighborhoods-to-blame-for-gentrification-of-poorer-ones/473349/ via Instapaper

“It is unlikely that people will stop talking about negative experiences at work. It is natural. But intentionally focusing on positive events can provide balance. We don’t advocate putting up happy posters, but companies can take steps to intelligently help people notice and share positive experiences. For example, how about starting a meeting with a review of what has gone well recently, rather than immediately jumping to what needs to be improved?” The Powerful Effect of Noticing Good Things at Work https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-powerful-effect-of-noticing-good-things-at-work via Instapaper

“Ames thought he had found a compound that safely moderates the pace at which cells use themselves up. He began dosing himself with acetylcarnitine, and continues to work at Berkeley, at age 85; whether he would have enjoyed such longevity anyway is unknowable. Pharmaceutical companies have shown little interest in Ames’s idea—because it occurs naturally, acetylcarnitine cannot be patented, and, worse from Big Pharma’s standpoint, the substance is inexpensive.” What Happens When We All Live to 100? http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/what-happens-when-we-all-live-to-100/379338/ via Instapaper

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