Organised Looting Of Islamic Heritage
Lydia Wilson & Cecilia Palombo | Newlines | 11th October 2024 | U
Antiquities trade, “turbocharged” by extremism, regional strife, and online marketplaces, is resulting in manuscripts — from Mali, Syria, Iraq — being ripped apart and sold by the page. “eBay sellers are representative of how this trade has operated for centuries: the insider dispersing library collections in the region, and the foreigner acquiring cheap manuscripts to take back home” (4,100 words)
Why Do We Get The Wrong Leaders?
James Vitali | Engelsberg Ideas | 10th October 2024 | U
Political leaders in the West seem to be lacking the elusive quality of judgement. For Max Weber, it was “the ability to strike a balance between two divergent ethical imperatives”. Judgement is not to be conflated with expertise, for this presumes that with enough knowledge, a person may become an expert in politics. Rather, it involves making decisions responsibly without knowing whether they are correct (2,500 words)
Anchoring Digital Sovereignty
Vivek Krishnamurthy | Social Science Research Network | 10th September 2024 | PDF
Territorial sovereignty applies online as it does offline; this is the prevailing consensus. This might conflict with efforts to keep the Internet “free, open, and global”. The law of the sea provides an alternative. Coastal states’ rights in waters off their shores are limited, and weaken the further one goes out to sea. Such a layering of sovereign rights could preserve the Internet’s free, open and global character (26,600 words)
Empty Vessels Of Time
Heidi Lasher | The Good Question | 7th October 2024 | U
A “culture of busyness” has replaced leisure as the new status symbol. The “harried leisure class” is always pursuing a “hectic agenda, filled with productive and edifying activities”. This author ekes out an afternoon watching the shadows play on her walls. “My kids drifted into the room as if magnetised by my lack of agenda. Like butterflies landing on my hand, they stayed and watched the shadows with me” (2,000 words)
from The Browser eleven years ago:
The Mother Of All Disruptions
Venkatesh Rao | Ribbonfarm | 11th October 2013 | U
Humans have used natural language for communication and thought since the dawn of the species. Now there is a rival soft technology: computing. “The difference is that computing can as yet only handle the simpler cases covered by natural language. But it serves those better than natural language.” Is this history’s biggest technological disruption? Only electricity, as fire’s replacement, comes close (6,100 words)
Podcast: How To Design A Book Cover | A People’s Guide To Publishing. Primarily on making a book cover stand out, with other insights on book-buying behaviour (23m 29s)
Video: The FlyWire Connectome | YouTube | FlyWire Princeton | 2m 14s
Mapping the brain of an adult fruit fly. With nearly 140,000 neurons, this is a big step up from previous efforts to map the brain of the worm C.Elegans, with 302 neurons and the larval fruit fly, with 3,000 neurons.
Afterthought:
“Without a song, each day would be a century”
— Mahalia Jackson