Hoarding, Cluetrain, Murder In Italy, Free Speech, D'Angelo
Homeless And Hoarding
Leah Sottile | Atlantic | 7th January 2015
Poignant short essay on the overlap between hoarding and homelessness. Poor people may stockpile possessions "as a link to a more prosperous past or insurance for a difficult future". But hoarding brings difficulties of its own. It makes eviction more likely. It overwhelms the hoarder. “The stuff takes over their life because they can’t manage all that stuff. But they need all that stuff, in their own mind, to manage their own internal life” (2,370 words)
New Clues
David Weinberger & Doc Searls | Cluetrain | 8th January 2015
Authors of the venerable Cluetrain Manifesto return with a new roadmap for a better internet: "Every time you call us 'consumers' we feel like cows looking up the word 'meat' ... If we want our government to back off, the deal has to be that when the next attack comes, we can't complain that they should have surveilled us harder ... A conversation isn't your business tugging at our sleeve to shill a product we don't want to hear about" (3,200 words)
The Murder That Has Obsessed Italy
Tobias Jones | Guardian | 8th January 2015
A girl's body is found near Bergamo. DNA traces suggest that the killer was the son of a local man long since dead. But the man's only acknowledged son has a perfect alibi. Somewhere there must be an illegitimate son. The search begins for "a woman, presumably in middle- to old-age, who 30 or 40 years ago had had an affair with a married man, now long dead, and given birth to a boy who went on to murder Yara Gambirasio" (5,200 words)
The Right To Ridicule
Ronald Dworkin | New York Review Of Books | 23rd March 2006
"In a democracy no one can have a right not to be insulted or offended. If minorities wish to be protected from economic or legal discrimination by law, then they must be willing to tolerate whatever insults or ridicule people who oppose such legislation wish to offer to their fellow voters, because only a community that permits such insult as part of public debate may legitimately adopt such laws" (1,000 words)
A+ For D’Angelo
Jeff Peretz | Cuepoint | 23rd December 2014
D’Angelo’s Black Messiah is not merely the best album of the past year, it is one of the great albums of all time, on a level with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. The songs have "the sophistication of jazz standards". The influences range from Thelonius Monk to Paul McCartney, and everything falls where it should. It swings. "No one in R&B can make a record at this level anymore" (1,500 words)
Video of the day: Quids In
What to expect: Joyous, spectacular skateboarding video shot in Liverpool and Edinburgh (9'56")
Thought for the day
Honesty may be the best policy, but, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy
George Carlin