Archaeology, Computing, Teenagers, Gender, David Hockney

Klejn’s Commandments

Michael Gilleland | Laudator Temporis Acti | 2nd December 2017

How to be an archaeologist; the rules for which are generalisable, with a few tweaks, to many other professions. Among them: “The scholarly world is not a team of friends. What is your discovery is a loss for someone else. And this someone is usually a prominent and powerful person. Therefore having made a discovery do not expect universal delight. Be ready for tough resistance, sudden attacks and a gruelling and lingering war. A scholar needs talent second and courage first” (760 words)

The Electronic Revolution

Christopher Felix McDonald | Creatures Of Thought | 3rd December 2017

On the origins of electronic digital computing. The fan-out began when John von Neumann came across the ENIAC computer at the Moore School in Philadelphia while seeking more computing power for America’s nuclear bomb in 1944. His paper on ENIAC seeded a decade of post-war work on computer science, leading to production of the first commercial mainframe computers by IBM in 1954. “Electronic computing was no longer a strange anomaly of 1940; it had become normal science” (4,800 words)

Raising A Teenage Daughter

Elizabeth Weil & Hannah Duane | California Sunday | 30th November 2017

There is the germ of something brilliant in the format here. A mother writes about her teenage daughter; the daughter annotates the article. Click on the highlighted portions to see the annotations. The effect is one of eavesdropping on a conversation between the inner voices of mother and daughter. Both have precision and charm. Hard to say which is more compelling — the honesty of the dialogue, or the love so clearly present. Would an angry dialogue make such good reading? (1,600 words)

The Emperor’s New Workplace

Hollis Robbins | Medium | 30th November 2017

“It has taken multiple voices for a certain transparent truth about men and power and nakedness to be finally acknowledged. And what is this truth? Not that men in power will do terrible things to women, but that so many good men will know and stay silent when there is no public scrutiny. The effect of sexual harassment is on the whole good for men’s careers. What man wants to look at the job he’s holding and ask if there ought to have been more competition for it?” (1,300 words)

More Light!

Julian Bell | New York Review Of Books | 3rd December 2017

Wonderfully rounded appraisal of David Hockney, whose genius has always been to delight; which could easily have led him into laziness; but his fascination with technique and technology have sustained his sense of adventure. “Hockney is an apostle of niceness and kindness. Yet experience of the exhibition surely complicates this typecasting. To go from work to work is to discover how some rugs sink deeper than others, and that worthwhile art turns on depth, not on breadth” (2,900 words)

Video of the day An Affordable Tank For Our Sone

What to expect:

Satire

Thought for the day

I live my life but I don’t live in it
Susan Sontag

Podcast of the day When The Caskets Come Home | Battle Scars

PG-15 for subject matter. US Army mortuary worker describes dealing with bodies shipped home from Iraq
(27'00")