Photography, Transitioning, Philanthropy, India, 1968

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The Photographer And Architecture

Naoya Hatakeyama | Places Journal | 3rd April 2018

How a photographer sees the world: It divides first into standing things and lying things. “Standing things resist my vision. They include street signs, trees, humans, buildings, forests and cliffs, mountains and thunderclouds. Things that are lying down encompass floors and corridors, grounds and streets, and railroad tracks, as well as sporting fields and airport runways, the surfaces of deserts and great rivers, and the expanse of oceans. They do not resist my vision” (2,950 words)

Mallory Is Not Gone

Heather Havrilesky | The Cut | 13th March 2018

Much-loved blogger and agony columnist Daniel Mallory Ortberg talks about transitioning from woman to man. “It felt like a demon snuck into my room in the middle of the night and said, ‘What if you were kind of a guy?’ and then just left and was like, ‘No follow-up questions!’ So I was dealing with that, and also turning 30 around that time. One day I went to sleep a businesswoman, and woke up the next morning not that, and in some ways that felt arresting” (3,330 words)

The Triumph Of Philanthropy

Scott Sherman | Lapham's Quarterly | 2nd April 2018

America’s super-rich have a choice: They can allow the IRS to tax their money at 40 percent, or they can dispose of their fortunes as they choose, via philanthropy. They prefer the second. In the past fifteen years, 30,000 new private foundations have been established. There are now more than 90,000 private foundations, whose assets total $700 billion. “What exactly is the public getting in exchange for colossal tax breaks granted for philanthropy, which mainly go to rich people?” (3,750 words)

How We Indians Came To Be

Tony Joseph | Quint | 3rd April 2018

“Before you begin to read this, take a chair and sit down comfortably. This is going to take some time, and it is going to address fundamental questions about how we, the Indians, came to be”. The Indus Valley Civilisation was probably built and populated by a mixed population of Iranian agriculturists and South Asian hunter-gatherers; pastoralists of the south-eastern Steppe moved into South Asia in the second millennium BC, bringing with them Indo-European language and culture (4,200 words)

1968

John Gray | New Statesman | 2nd April 2018

The counter-culture of the 1960s was flamboyant but far from revolutionary. The rebellions of the day produced little in the way of basic political change; they did, on the other hand, accelerate the growth of modern capitalism. By then Western countries were very good at producing things, but much more inhibited about consuming them. The hedonism and individualism of the sixties got rid of that inhibition, and “played a definite part in opening the way to Thatcher and Reagan” (2,240 words)

Video of the day Base Number Jokes Explained

What to expect:

There are 10 kinds of people in this world: Those who enjoy these jokes, and those who don’t (4’02”)

Thought for the day

What matters is to know something that others don’t know you know
Umberto Eco

Podcast of the day Mosquitoes Smell Danger | 60-Second Science

Karen Hopkin of Scientific American explains how mosquitoes use smell to choose prey and dodge danger
(2m 27s)