Tom's Review #181 - Abundance, Rich Girls, Alvvays
📖 What I’m Reading:Outcome Orientation as a Cure for Information Overload – Common Cognition
The Abundance Agenda – Matt Bruenig
The Impossible Profession – The New Yorker
Book finished: Rich Girl Nation by Katie Gatti Tassin: 5/5
☝️ Word of the Month:rupestrian (adj) roo-PES-tree-uhn Relating to, composed of, or carved on rocks. From Latin rupes (rock). “Set in a former 13th-century rupestrian chapel, the hotel has incredible interiors, with towering arches, golden stone, and rooms carved into the cave.” 🎵 Jams of the Month:The shoegaze bliss of Alvvays
The cheeky, mathy rock of American Football
The involuntary head-bob lyricism of Nas
💬 Quote of the Month:Friedrich Schiller, in response to a friend who wrote him to complain of “meagre literary production"— The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination. I will make my idea more concrete by a simile. It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in—at the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with the others. On the other hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason—so it seems to me—relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass. . . . You critics, or whatever else you may call yourselves, are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are to be found in all truly creative minds and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. You complain of your unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely. ps: who among us (X) pps: Jokic with verve and wiles (X) ppps: Boiler Room of the month (YouTube) |
Thomas Tassin
📖 What I’m Reading: How the 7-minute Louvre robbery unfolded – DailyMail Imagine holding something worth $100 million in your hands and dropping it and then just shrugging and getting on a scooter and scooting off into the crisp Parisian morning air. Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist – The Guardian Obviously his arguments are unhinged and just plain wrong. (Why exactly are international agencies bad? Just because you think they’re “shadowy?”...
📖 What I’m Reading: Stanislov Petrov – Wikipedia My #1 most underrated historical figure and story. “An investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned. Because his decision may have averted a retaliatory nuclear strike, Petrov is often credited as having ‘saved the world’.” Against Treating Chatbots as Conscious – Erik Hoel The new ethical frontier. Why the 5% Rule is the New 4% Rule – Nick Maggiulli New data on retirement spending. Book...
📖 What I’m Reading: How Police Let One of America’s Most Prolific Predators Get Away – Ronan Farrow Crazy, long, disturbing New Yorker article. South Park creators 'relying' on so-called 'small-penis rule' to avoid Trump legal action – The Mirror “The small-penis strategy allows creators to portray a real-life figure in a fictional work while minimizing the risk of a libel suit by attributing the character a small penis. The reasoning is that any potential lawsuit would require the plaintiff,...