Invisible Hands , Throbbing Gristle, Paul Krugman, Andrew Wyeth, Bullets
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Invisible-Hand Ethics
Thomas Wells | Three Quarks Daily | 18th December 2017
Doing right by others is difficult and time-consuming. Hence the attraction of Adam Smith’s fleeting metaphor of the “invisible hand”, which suggests that by pursuing our own self-interest we can create a better world for all. But Smith wasn’t absolving us from public duty; he imagined a society with regulated markets and disinterested regulators. “No wonder the invisible hand has broken down. We have forgotten how it works, and how much care and effort it takes to keep it going” (1,490 words)
Genesis P-Orridge On Destroying Preconceptions
T. Cole Rachel | Creative Independent | 18th December 2017
He seemed ridiculous at the time; but, judging from this talk, perhaps there was something there after all, in the theory if not the practice. “My approach is always if there’s nothing I want, then I’ll make something that I would want. You have to get everything that’s normal and break it. We felt very uneasy with the society that we were in and we didn’t get any pleasure from the sonic information that we were receiving from other people, so we decided to look at that particular issue and change it” (2,750 words)
Talking Policy With Paul Krugman
Ezra Klein | Vox | 14th December 2017
Interview. Topics include taxation, health care, debt, innovation. “If you walked into a 1957 kitchen you would be annoyed: Where’s my microwave? But you would basically know what to do and feel able to function. But if someone from 1957 walked into a kitchen from 1897, they’d be horrified: How do people live like this? If I take that particular metric, technological progress over the past 60 years has been substantially slower than it was over the previous 60 years” (5,700 words)
Andrew Wyeth Forever
James Panero | New Criterion | 18th December 2017
On the strange collision between style and mood in the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, which contrive to be pastoral yet sinister “Wyeth manipulated his compositions much like a silent film director. His captions were his allusive titles. He used real people and real places but cast them in his own scouted locations. He processed the idioms of one medium through the materials of another, pressing it all together in the dying light of illustration and the lingering moods of Symbolism and the American Gothic” (2,700 words)
What Bullets Do To Bodies
Jason Fagone | Huffpost Highline | 26th April 2017
At work with Amy Goldberg, chair of surgery at Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, who treats hundreds of gunshot wounds each year. “Goldberg has built up a deep well of experience in doing the things that are necessary to save the lives of gun victims, the things that are never shown on TV or in movies, the things that stay hidden behind hospital walls and allow Americans to imagine whatever they like about the effects of bullets or not to imagine anything at all” (7,800 words)
Video of the day Man
What to expect:
A short animated history of the Anthropocene, by Steve Cutts
Thought for the day
Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about
Marshall McLuhan
Podcast of the day Our Father The Algorithm | Flash Forward
Despatch from an imagined near future in which a tech mogul has invented a new religion
(52'39")