Ok, allora, chiariamoci subito le idee. Chiunque può dire qualsiasi cosa, è il bello della nostra società. Ci sono le cose serie, e poi ci sono le cose leggere di cui ci occupiamo tendenzialmente qui. Tra queste ultime spicca l'intervento di questo tizio che dice: adesso vi spiego come si fa a leggere meglio per diventare più intelligenti. Che, va beh, già il titolo sembra per gente che deve ancora leggere molto, oltre che meglio. Ma non giudichiamo il proverbiale libro dalla copertina. Invece, leggiamo cosa scrive e a quel punto mandiamolo a quel paese senza passare dal Via (così non prende neanche i soldi). Ma si può? Che idiota.

Money quote: "Ruin the Ending. When I start a book, I almost always go straight to Wikipedia (or Amazon or a friend) and ruin the ending. Who cares? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.

You ought to ruin the ending–or find out the basic assertions of the book–because it frees you up to focus on your two most important tasks: What does it mean? Do you agree with it?

The first 50 pages of the book shouldn’t be a discovery process for you; you shouldn’t be wasting your time figuring out what the author is trying to say with the book.

Instead, your energy needs to be spent on figuring out if he’s right and how you can benefit from it. Plus if you already know what happens, you can identify all the foreshadowing and the clues the first read through."

https://medium.com/personal-growth/how-to-digest-books-above-your-level-and-increase-your-intelligence-a11bd134da13

A un certo punto John McPhee andava di moda anche qui da noi. Poi se lo sono dimenticato tutti. Invece, il maestro di un giornalismo faticoso, minuzioso e affascinante - devastato dalle inutili repliche in rete - ha pubblicato un nuovo libro alquanto interessante sulla vita (e le gioie) di chi scrive.

Money quote: “There are only two kinds of writers in the world, according to John McPhee: the overtly insecure and the covertly insecure. His new book, “Draft. No. 4,” a collection of essays on craft, is a sunny tribute to the gloomy side of the writing life: the insecurity, dread, shame, envy, magical thinking, pointless rituals, financial instability, self-hatred — the whole “masochistic self-inflicted paralysis of a writer’s normal routine.” And then the queasy desire to do it all over again”

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/books/review-draft-no-4-john-mcphee.html

I soliti ricercatori delle neuroscienze stanno facendo le solite ricerche per "vedere" dove sono i nostri ricordi all'interno del cervello. Perché? Beh, almeno la risposta a questa domanda è interessante.

Money quote: "Chen is among a growing number of researchers using brain imaging to identify the activity patterns involved in creating and recalling a specific memory. Powerful technological innovations in human and animal neuroscience in the past decade are enabling researchers to uncover fundamental rules about how individual memories form, organize and interact with each other. Using techniques for labelling active neurons, for example, teams have located circuits associated with the memory of a painful stimulus in rodents and successfully reactivated those pathways to trigger the memory. And in humans, studies have identified the signatures of particular recollections, which reveal some of the ways that the brain organizes and links memories to aid recollection. Such findings could one day help to reveal why memories fail in old age or disease, or how false memories creep into eyewitness testimony. These insights might also lead to strategies for improved learning and memory."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00107-4

Metti una videocamera ad alta definizione (una Red) sulla pancia di un aereo e fatti un bel volo: questo è quello che viene catturato dal sensore e dall'ottica della Red.

Money quote: "This is a very special project to me that I conceived of and directed for one of my favorite clients who shall remain nameless for now. Over several months of prep and R&D we modified a LearJet and flew above the earth looking straight down at the shear beauty of what Mother Nature has to offer us that we all too often miss from the ground. Shot on RED in 8K."

https://vimeo.com/240106846

Alla fine, ci vuole equilibrio.

Money quote: “True growth and success is always sustainable. It’s not a short sprint with an inevitable physical, mental, and emotional crash. All goals are means, not ends. Each succeeding stage of your progression should clearly build one-upon-another, leaving you stronger and more able, not weaker and permanently damaged”

https://medium.com/personal-growth/6-things-you-need-to-recover-from-every-day-eb80229eda1

Finalmente un po’ di gonzo journalism. Questo reporter cerca di farsi dire se davvero iPhone X è il migliore dei telefoni possibili. Le risposte nei negozi, Apple store inclusi, sono divertenti.

Money quote: “So I made an appointment to change the battery on my iPhone 6.

I was greeted by a slightly surly man who sat me down and told me that if my battery needed replacing, they might not have the parts, so I'd have to come back again.

Still, when the Genius arrived, things picked up. “

https://www.cnet.com/news/iphone-x-is-the-best-my-search-to-find-apple-store-staff-who-agree/

Il sogno utopico delle criptovalute: democratizzare i soldi

Money quote: “Discussions of decentralization may seem esoteric, but anyone interested in the future of cryptocurrency should try to follow along. Part of the vision sold by the technology’s biggest promoters is that it can help solve problems of financial inequality created in part by traditional, centralized institutions. If digital currency allows wealth and power to pool in the hands of a few, that’s not so revolutionary.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610018/bitcoin-and-ethereum-have-a-hidden-power-structure-and-its-just-been-revealed/

Anni fa intervista un fisico italiano he mi spiegava: pensare di risolvere i problemi ambientali del pianeta e delle sue risorse senza rendersi conto che è un sistema chiuso, e quindi che è impossibile continuare a crescere senza limiti. A meno di non voler uscire dal pianeta. Che poi è esattamente il piano di Elon Musk al netto della fantascienza. Però intanto cominciamo a parlare di asteroidi...

Money quote: “Many people are skeptical of asteroid-mining because they imagine that the goal is to bring platinum back for sale in Earth’s metals market. Reporters repeatedly cite an irresistible statistic that the platinum in an asteroid can be worth trillions of US dollars, but anyone with an understanding of economics realises that bringing home a huge stash of precious metal would crash the market, reducing the valuation of the asteroid. “

https://aeon.co/ideas/want-faster-data-and-a-cleaner-planet-start-mining-asteroids

Francia, il libertinaggio come strumento di emancipazione, e #MeToo. Un discorso sul femminismo tra culture diverse

Money quote: “It’s no news to anyone that France has a historically masculine-centric culture. The great republican project of the Revolution left women out; in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1791), Olympe de Gouges supplied her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. (When she got too mouthy, the Jacobins arrested and executed her.) Feminism here has always been articulated not as a philosophy of equality, as it has in Anglophone countries, but around a philosophy of difference. This has often resulted in essentialist ideas about women’s experiences; as the feminist journalist and activist Lauren Bastide put it recently, the universalist French feminist context “is the opposite of intersectionalist feminism. You’re never going to be able to say that being a black woman is different from being a white woman.””

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/24/french-libertines-reckoning-metoo/

📢 👫 #Giornalismocostruttivo #Migranti
Qualche giorno fa la città di Sesto Fiorentino è finita sulle pagine di The Guardian come buon esempio di accoglienza. Nell’articolo “How migrants won the friendship of wary Florentines” si racconta, infatti, come a Sesto Fiorentino, grazie all’impegno del Comune e di una cooperativa sociale, i cittadini abbiano superato la diffidenza nei confronti dei rifugiati ospiti in città e inaugurato un nuovo modello di integrazione. Un bell’articolo di “giornalismo costruttivo” che affronta un tema quanto mai attuale non limitandosi alla solita denuncia di ciò che non va ma mostrando in che modo costruire soluzioni e cambiamenti positivi. Del resto The Guardian da tempo dedica molta attenzione al giornalismo costruttivo e recentemente ha inaugurato la sezione di positive news “Half Full” (Mezzo Pieno). Dateci un’occhiata e la vostra giornata sarà migliore!

Adoro Malta e ci vado ogni volta che posso. La storia dell'arcipelago mi piace, la bellezza, le persone. Anni fa ho letto un libro delizioso ambientato nella Malta medioevale. Ma in rete si trovano anche degli articoli piacevoli e interessanti come questo, che forniscono una prospettiva non banale della vita e delle persone di Malta.

Money quote: "For the locals who left the Maltese countryside and headed to Strait Street, they could go from making a few shillings a day to hundreds of shillings a day as a barmaid. Naturally, Strait Street also became a hive for romance between Maltese women and foreign men, who fathered an unrecorded number of children.

“I just loved the Americans,” one barmaid, Nina, told Cini. “I went mad over them. They bought me clothes. I wore dresses each costing £70 and £80.” Barmaids like Nina would earn money either through a regular wage or commission per drink, then spend lavish amounts of money on anything from gold jewelry to betting games. “There were times we promised sailors a good time, and then gave them a false address,” Nina recounted.

Not everyone stayed on Strait Street as long as Nina did, however. Young village women who were very poor wanted to get a dowry, so they worked as a bar girl for a couple years, made some money, then went home and got married."

https://www.fodors.com/news/uncategorized/sex-lies-and-cobblestones-the-debaucherous-story-behind-maltas-most-notorious-street

Lo sto provando: rischia di essere il miglior calendario-organizer che abbia mai usato

Money quote: “calcurse is a calendar and scheduling application for the command line. It helps keep track of events, appointments and everyday tasks. A configurable notification system reminds user of upcoming deadlines, the curses based interface can be customized to suit user needs and a very powerful set of command line options can be used to filter and format appointments, making it suitable for use in noscripts.”

http://calcurse.org

Una scrittrice racconta storie esplicite sul tradimento (e altro) di una donna che potrebbe somigliarle. Perché le domande che fanno a lei sono diverse da quelle che si fanno invece a un autore uomo? Un altro modo di guardare il rapporto tra l’autore e l’opera, ma anche alle differenze di genere.

Money quote: “Let’s be clear: “What does your husband think about your work” is a ruse. Beneath that query is the real question: Did you, the author, do the things the female character does in your narrative? If so, how’d you get away with writing about it? Isn’t your husband hurt? And aren’t you ashamed?”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/16/husband-think-novel/

Nintendo Labo, la carta speciale di Nintendo per la Switch è un cartoncino - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/nintendo-gioca-carta-speciale-la-switch/

Geniali e diabolici. Sono gli editori e gli autori di libri di auto aiuto per l’infanzia.

Money quote: “I knew all these things – but what I didn’t yet understand was the diabolical genius of the baby-advice industry, which targets people at their most sleep-deprived, at the beginning of what will surely be the weightiest responsibility of their lives, and suggests that maybe, just maybe, between the covers of this book, lies the morsel of information that will make the difference between their baby’s flourishing or floundering. The brilliance of this system is that it works on the most sceptical readers, too, because you don’t need to believe it’s likely such a morsel actually exists. You need only think it likely enough to justify spending another £10.99 on, oh, you know, the entire future happiness of your child, just in case. Assuming you’ve got £10.99 to spare, what kind of monster would refuse?”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/16/baby-advice-books-industry-attachment-parenting

Alcuni piccoli o meno piccoli errori nel libro anti-Trump di Michael Wolff ne incrinano la credibilità. Oppure no.

Money quote: “Amid such an uproar, the matter of Mark Berman’s nonexistent breakfast at the Four Seasons hardly ranks. Still, even among the many errors in the book, some big and many small, this one stood out. It was the kind of mistake that only someone who doesn’t know Washington could have made—the kind of mistake that matters to a small handful of D.C. players. And it prompts readers to ask, If Wolff got the small things wrong, did he get the big things wrong as well? The Trump White House has seized on such mistakes to call into question the book’s damning, and mostly accurate, larger portrayal of this Presidency”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/michael-wolff-says-that-washington-will-bury-trump

Viviamo in un mondo estremamente complesso. E la su complessità ci sfugge completamente perché è al di sopra delle nostre capacità cognitive. Merito mostro, ovviamente, perché l’abbiamo creato noi.

Money quote: “But ever since the Enlightenment, we have moved steadily toward the ‘Entanglement’, a term coined by the American computer scientist Danny Hillis. The Entanglement is the trend towards more interconnected and less comprehensible technological surroundings. Hillis argues that our machines, while subject to rational rules, are now too complicated to understand. Whether it’s the entirety of the internet or other large pieces of our infrastructure, understanding the whole — keeping it in your head — is no longer even close to possible”

https://aeon.co/essays/is-technology-making-the-world-indecipherable

Un’analisi della radicalizzazione dell’ultimo pensiero di Martin Luther King, che ha trasportato - poco prima del suo omicidio - la lotta contro la segregazione su un nuovo livello e contro il capitalismo statunitense.

Money quote: “It was this foray into the tough political environment of residential segregation and political machines that provided the momentum for King’s radicalization. His political maturation prompted him to connect the U.S. war in Vietnam to the deteriorating conditions in U.S. cities, and of even more consequence, it prompted him to search for more effective tactics in confronting the legal menace of segregation in the North and the attendant crises: slum conditions, unemployment, and police brutality”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/15/remembering-martin-luther-kings-radical-class-politics/

Se vi capita di andare a Hong Kong fate un salto a Quarry Bay con la metro e andatevi a vedere il 'Monster Building', un bestione (anzi un insieme di bestioni) indimenticabile.

Money quote: “The Monster Building, as it’s been nicknamed by locals, isn’t actually a single building, but a complex composed of five connecting structures: Oceanic Mansion, Fook Cheong Building, Montane Mansion, Yick Cheong Building, and Yick Fat Building. They were built during a population boom in the 1960s to offer government-subsidized housing for low-income residents.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/quarry-bay-monster-building

Un padre con i reni che stanno per crollare e la posizione nella lista dei trapianti troppo bassa, va per l’ultima volta al parco Disney di Orlando con una maglietta che dice “ho bisogno di un rene”. Lo fotografano, le immagini diventano virali sui social e salta fuori un donatore.

Money quote: “So, with the help of his daughter, Liebowitz designed a simple, white T-shirt with black lettering that read: “In Need of Kidney. O positive.” He added his phone number and turned himself into a walking billboard at the theme park, the Orlando Sentinel reported.“

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article196730204.html

Uber vale un sacco di soldi e viene considerato il campione della nuova economia della condivisione. Ma a quanto pare somiglia sempre più a una associazione a delinquere, un soggetto veramente brutto (comunque i taxisti non li sopporto lo stesso). Come il codice segreto da spedire al quartier generale quando entra la polizia negli uffici di una filiale, che consente di bloccare da remoto istantaneamente tutti i computer e telefoni, bloccando l'accesso alle autorità anche se in possess di un mandato. Una pratica consolidata di questo tipo vi sembra una cosa normale, per una azienda?

Money quote: "The Uber HQ team overseeing Ripley could remotely change passwords and otherwise lock up data on company-owned smartphones, laptops, and desktops as well as shut down the devices. This routine was initially called the unexpected visitor protocol. Employees aware of its existence eventually took to calling it Ripley, after Sigourney Weaver’s flamethrower-wielding hero in the Alien movies. The nickname was inspired by a Ripley line in Aliens, after the acid-blooded extraterrestrials easily best a squad of ground troops. “Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/uber-s-secret-tool-for-keeping-the-cops-in-the-dark