Newsletter 920

Ten Virtues For The Modern Age

Alain de Botton | School Of Life | 4 February 2013

"Being virtuous has become a strange and depressing notion, while wickedness and evil bask in a peculiar kind of glamour." Virtue needs rehabilitating. But also updating. Try this draft list of ten virtues appropriate to the modern age: Resilience; empathy; patience; sacrifice; politeness; humour; self-awareness; forgiveness; hope; confidence

The Trouble With Wall Street

Michael Lewis | New Republic | 4 February 2013

Review of "Why I Left Goldman Sachs", by Greg Smith: "The dystopia often imagined in the world of artificial intelligence has actually happened in the world of finance. The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own, beyond human control. The people flow into and out of them but have only incidental effect on their behaviour"

Female Celebrity Profiles And The Men Who Write Them

Carly Lewis | Walrus | 31 January 2013

"Male writers have had decades to remedy themselves, but still write jejunely about women, accentuating one isolated, exploitable trait (attractive, rebellious, sweet, rude, slutty, rich) for the sake of producing more easily understood subject matter. When men write about men, they glorify. When they write about women, they minimize."

A Loaded Gun

Patrick Radden Keefe | New Yorker | 3 February 2013

Painstaking investigation into past life of neurobiologist Amy Bishop, who shot six colleagues after being denied tenure at the university of Alabama in 2010. Plenty of warning signs. She shot her brother too, in childhood, though the police agreed to call it an accident. And may have sent a pipe bomb to her PhD supervisor. And was "hearing voices"

Sin City Savior's Quest To Cure The Common Hangover

Greg Beato | Buzzfeed | 1 February 2013

On the front line with America's pre-eminent — perhaps its only — hangover doctor, Dr Jason Burke. In Las Vegas, on New Year's Day. He has a surgery, he does house calls, but most of the time he operates from a 45-foot bus. His $199 Rapture package includes Zofran, Toradol, hydration fluids, vitamins, antioxidents—and it works

Drone Home

Lev Grosswman | Time | 1 February 2013

On the history, morality, technology, and usage of drones. They've transformed warfare. They're about to transform our personal lives, as they reach the mass market. Think of them as flying robots. "When robots take to the air, they're faster and nimbler and more graceful than humans will ever be. All along, robots just wanted to be drones"

Video of the day: Folding Space-Time

Thought for the day:

"A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us" — Franz Kafka

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