Butchery, Kosovo, Bill Clinton, Ebola, Marc Andreessen, Klinghoffer
Farm Confessional: Butchering Your Animals
Katherine Dunn | Modern Farmer | 15th October 2014
A farmer writes: "I want to describe what it is like to be present at butcher day, and what goes into the routine leading up to it. It is not just the moment the throat is cut, it is the combined moments leading up to its death – the birth, the growth and the eventual day of butchering – that allow you to understand what it feels like to look down at the same animal bleeding out. When we first started, I couldn’t look" (1,680 words)
In Kosovo
Justin Erik Halldór Smith | 18th October 2014
Notes on Kosovar culture and Albanian language. "Yes, one always descends into the Balkans, like some Dame Rebecca West. One takes up smoking again, despises health and well-being and complacent comfort, and feels the sharpest contempt for the sanctimonious academic colleagues one has left behind in the so-called West. Where is my track suit? Where are my cigarettes? Where is my broken nose?" (2,244 words)
Bill Clinton In Bubbaland
Lisa DePaulo | Bloomberg Politics | 17th October 2014
Letter from Little Rock, where Bill Clinton "dips in and out of town quite a bit", staying in an apartment on top of his Presidential Library equipped with a replica of the Oval Office. "He has more friends than a dog has ticks". But Hillary is "in some sense, an in-law, judged and critiqued, not real family". Arkansas has still not forgiven her for failing to take her husband's name when they married 35 years ago (3,350 words)
Inside The Ebola Wars
Richard Preston | New Yorker | 20th October 2014
Gripping, close-up account of the outbreak of Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, focusing on the first deaths and the medical and scientific response. The West Africa epidemic is out of control: "Health workers have lost track of the chains. Too many people are sick". America and Europe can still hope to keep Ebola in check by diagnosing and quarantining sufferers. A vaccine is at least a year away (10,300 words)
Marc Andreessen In Conversation
Kevin Roose | New York | 19th October 2014
Interview with venture capitalist about investment, innovation, tech culture, government. "If you’re a businessperson, especially a CEO, you run a dictatorship. But businesses and governments are different. They have very little to do with each other. When it comes to government, I am pro-gridlock. Three branches, two parties, representation, Electoral College, all good. Love it, fantastic, let’s do that again" (6,770 words)
Klinghoffer In Brooklyn Heights
Robert Fink | Cambridge Opera Journal | 1st October 2005
Expert essay on John Adams's opera, Death Of Klinghoffer, looking back to the 1991 New York première at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the "epicentre of a controversy that continues to this day". New York audiences showed themselves "uniquely hostile" to Klinghoffer, angered less by the inferred ideological content than by "specific nuances in the satirical portrayal of American Jewish character" (PDF) (15,000 words)
Video of the day: Quantum Computers Animated
What to expect: Cartoon. Theoretical physicists John Preskill and Spiros Michalakis describe how things are different in the quantum world
Thought for the day
We hear music in the song of the nightingale, but a music that no nightingale has heard
Roger Scruton (https://twitter.com/scruton_quotes/status/524493707429818368)
The Death of Old Europe 3rd November, St Mary Moorfields Church, 7pm
The brilliant and charming David Hargreaves, editor of The Browser Looks Back, will be our guide to the extraordinary parallel world of 1914. Admission is free. Click here to register. (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/august-december-1914-the-death-of-old-europe-tickets-13574558871)