Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Superb short essay in favour of boat-rocking. "Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes." This is where great art comes from. If we believe in liberty, we must celebrate it
"This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr." A revolutionary photo sharing service, destroyed by Yahoo
"The joining of husband and wife yields a more productive firm, because it allows one spouse to specialise in earning income from working in the market, while the other specialises in the domestic sphere." But times change
Oxford University professor on nature of logic. "If the idea of information as ruling out possibilities can’t handle the informativeness of logic, that is a problem for that idea of information, not for the informativeness of logic"
Photographing Marilyn Monroe. Lawrence Schiller did it, to great effect. His account of working with the flirtatious, calculating star has shades of a coming-of-age story and makes for surprisingly compulsive reading
Psychologist Daryl Bem has always challenged conventional beliefs. He was first to claim that people adjust their emotions after observing their own behaviour. It seemed radical, now it's widely accepted. But defending precognition?
American citizen of Palestinian descent flies to Israel, aiming to visit sister in West Bank. On landing in Tel Aviv she faces immigration. Despite best preparations, it doesn't go well. Soon she's sent to the "Arab room"
The gold standard helped cause economic problems of the 1930s; abandoning it opened way to recovery. Could same be true of the euro? Economist who wrote book on Europe and the gold standard says things will be different this time
Remembering Intervision, Soviet Union's version of Eurovision song contest. Concept came from Wladyslaw Szpilman, hero of Polanski's film The Pianist. Aim was "to prove to the West that 'anything you can sing, we can sing better'"
Married to the 'Ndrangheta. "Ms Cacciola was forced into a loveless marriage at the age of 16, with a man who almost immediately disappeared into the solitary confinement wing of a prison. From then on, she was rarely allowed out"
Sportswriter's daughter had never shown much interest in his area of expertise. Then, unaccountably, she developed an interest in NASCAR, one of the few sports her father knew virtually nothing about. Eh? Classic, charming Posnanski
This republished piece, from 1920, sees Hemingway observe the behaviour of Toronto's opportunistic mayor at a local boxing bout. More great stuff from the Toronto Star's new Hemingway Papers project
How can Germany be so stable with a history like that?
"If futurism is visionary, history is revisionary"
"There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is"
Barney Frank, on JP Morgan's $2bn trading loss
"JP Morgan Chase, entirely without any help from the government has lost, in this one set of transactions, five times the amount they claim financial regulation is costing them"
