Sindrome da connessione infantile tra i bambini Usa: il 40% tra gli 0 e 8 anni ha un tablet - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/connessi-negli-usa-40-gli-0-8-anni-un-tablet/

C'è questo problema delle molestie sessuali che, intanto che è finalmente venuto fuori, ha degli effetti secondari piuttosto destabilizzanti. Ad esempio: nella Silicon Valley c'è chi si chiede come gestire l'idea di colleghi di lavoro che escono insieme o si fidanzano. Si scopre che la "office romance" è in declino, ma alcuni passaggi sono veramente agghiaccianti.

Money quote: "And some employers have even resorted to so-called "love contracts," documents in which both members of a relationship confirm that they weren't coerced into dating and that they agree to behave professionally while at work."

http://bit.ly/2EbaWnc

Ve lo ricordate lo scambio tra Diane Keaton e Woody Allen? "Ma davvero ti piace Wagner?". "Certo, anche se ogni volta che lo sento mi viene voglia di invadere la Polonia!" (Per i precisini era "Misterioso Omicidio a Manhatthan" del 1993).

Ecco, invece l'uomo era un rivoluzionario: come scrive il mio amico Roberto, "il Wagner era di sinistra, altro che invasione della Polonia!"

Money quote: "Addressing some 3,000 people, Wagner argued for a form of constitutional monarchy in which the king was an equal with his subjects; as part of the new dispensation, what he called “the demonic concept of money” would be abolished. The speech roused his listeners to wild enthusiasm, especially passages concerning the “sycophantic” courtiers by whom the king, he said, was surrounded: this was particularly gratifying, of course, coming from the Orchestral Conductor Royal and it went round the city like wildfire. The excitement of the event seems to have gone to Wagner’s head. Never popular in court circles, he was now acquiring serious enemies; that night at the theater he was due to conduct Rienzi, of all things, with its spectacular scenes of popular turbulence. He was warned that there might well be a demonstration against him; instead, he was greeted with a roar of approval."

http://lithub.com/how-wagner-tried-to-revolutionize-art-and-end-capitalism/

Il New Yorker non è particolarmente noto per le fotografie. Anzi, il settimanale newyorkese ha storicamente sempre evitato di cadere nel gorgo dei rotocalchi. Però, quando li fa, i suoi servizi fotografici sono molto belli. Come questo sulla nuova via della Seta tra Cina ed Europa

Money quote: "For the past three months, Ma Wei, twenty-five, has been working in a noodle shop in Lanzhou New Area. The restaurant makes three hundred bowls of hand-pulled noodles every day, mostly for laborers at a nearby construction site."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/08/a-new-silk-road

Intervista a Laura Donnini, l'amministratrice delegata della neonata HarperCollins Italia

Money quote: "«Siamo piccoli, molto affamati, molto energetici, molto appassionati, e cerchiamo di fare il vero lavoro degli editori, prendendoci cura degli autori». Laura Donnini mi accoglie così nel suo ufficio di amministratrice delegata di HarperCollins Italia, cinturone stretto in vita, stivali e collana di pietre, incarna bene lo spirito della casa editrice che vuole costruire. Nella stanza, organizzata e chiara, è appeso un ritaglio di giornale, il suo trofeo più grande: c’è stampata sopra la foto dello scrittore americano Wilbur Smith e la notizia che dopo 35 anni con Longanesi sarebbe passato a HarperCollins Italia, con otto nuovi romanzi. Per Smith non è stata una questione economica, dice Donnini: «a partire dalla stessa offerta ha scelto la freschezza di un approccio più su misura, ed è in questo che noi facciamo la differenza». È forse sempre per questo che il memoir di Smith, Leopard Rock. L’avventura della mia vita, uscirà in anteprima mondiale proprio in Italia, il 10 maggio: «un regalo che ha voluto fare ai lettori italiani», spiegano da HarperCollins."

http://www.ilpost.it/2018/02/09/harper-collins-laura-donnini/

Forse l'ultimo dei tre evasi da Alcatratz nel 1962 potrebbe essersi fatto vivo, qualche anno fa. Una storia da film della quale sappiamo ancora relativamente poco.

Money quote: "O’Keefe, the U.S. Marshal, said the agency doesn’t have any other leads to follow up on. But he said the case is still open and will stay open “as long as the possibility exists that any of the three are alive.”
In his letter, the man claiming to be Anglin says Morris died in 2008 and his brother Clarence passed away in 2011. “John” says he’s living in southern California, which, if it’s true, would mean the cops have done a pretty crappy job of finding him."

https://omgfacts.com/one-of-the-convicts-who-escaped-alcatraz-in-1962-may-have-surfaced-a2e573882828

Mi è capitato di visitare un po' di volte il Tempio dei Mormoni a Salt Lake City e chiacchierare con qualche esponente della Chiesa americana. La religione è poco conosciuta da noi e quel poco che sappiamo è abbastanza parziale. In realtà, ci sono molte cose alquanto singolari che si potrebbero imparare. Tipo il divieto assoluto di bere caffè, Coca Cola e té. Questo ha creato una specie di proibizionismo con i soliti che invece creano un mercato nero sotterraneo per l'agognata bibita ambrata...

Money quote: "At the time, all vending machines on BYU’s campus were controlled by Vending Services, who forbade caffeinated soda. “They would keep getting wind of this thing, and they could never find it,” Kearney says, chuckling. “Every time somebody from Vending Services would show up, Lee Walker would say, ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ and the next thing you’d know, we’d have to go and move it to some other place in the building.” It was a kind of open secret, he says. “Anybody from my time period would recall the ‘black market’ soda-pop machine that the theater department kept going.” (Karl Pope, a retired professor who taught in the department, remembers the machine, though he says it was not a secret—and that its fizzy spoils included Dr Pepper and caffeinated root beer.)"

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/caffeine-coke-mormons-vending-machine-brigham-young

Con la fotonica nascerà il computer intelligente - Il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/02/09/tecnologia/news/con-la-fotonica-nascer-il-computer-intelligente-ooPkZ7iaquoG45mVuhmRML/pagina.html

“Black Panther”, la recensione. Andiamo tutti a Wakanda, per sempre - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/02/black-panther-recensione-film-marvel/

L’ultimo film di Clint Eastwood pare che non sia granché.

Money quote: “I’m here to report what seems like a serious inaccuracy in the advertising of The 15:17 to Paris. According to the film’s poster, it was directed by Clint Eastwood, but I’m pretty sure the drama I watched was made by Tommy Wiseau—the eccentric artist behind the “so bad it’s good,” cult-classic movie The Room. How else to explain the halting dialogue, the way entire scenes have absolutely no bearing on the larger plot, and the ensemble of actors who have never been in a motion picture before? Watching The 15:17 to Paris summoned the kind of strange, unsettled feeling that only a true master like Wiseau can usually conjure”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/552773/

Io questo Ciccio Rigoli non ho idea di chi sia ma dice cose sacrosante.

Money quote: “Non ci sistemeremo, fatevene una ragione, non per ribellione ma perché è impossibile fare quello che avete fatto voi negli ultimi anni del Novecento. Purtroppo o per fortuna, non è dato saperlo.”

https://medium.com/@cicciorigoli/come-hanno-fottuto-i-trenta-quarantenni-51c295050a6c

Ad abundantiam, anche il Sole 24 Ore

http://www.alleyoop.ilsole24ore.com/2018/02/07/la-generazione-dei-30-40-e-sotto-scacco-un-costo-economico-per-litalia/

La storia bella e un po' triste di Alphasmart, la piccola azienda fondata da ex gente di Apple che aveva capito (quasi) tutto e creato la tastiera perfetta per la scuola

Money quote: "Unlike today’s education technology startups that rush to obtain venture capital at the first inkling of an idea, AlphaSmart was largely bootstrapped. (The company’s original name was Intelligent Peripheral Devices.) The team tried, but failed, to obtain an SBA loan. They pooled all their savings, kept their day jobs, and recruited Ketan Kothari’s brother, Manish, to head up marketing efforts, working out of Ketan’s spare bedroom – one of ed-tech’s few “garage” origin stories. After several points when the company almost folded due to financial and production issues, AlphaSmart started shipping in the fall of 1993. It couldn’t build a lot of inventory simply because it had little capital. However the devices were in high demand, and within six months, AlphaSmart found itself cash-flow positive (again, unlike today’s education technology startups, even if they’ve raised venture capital)."

http://hackeducation.com/2015/07/25/alphasmart

A New York si andrà a lezione di igiene mentale. Che, se ci pensate, è una cosa molto bella ma anche assai triste

Money quote: “That's why the introduction of mental health literacy in New York schools this coming fall is such a big deal, Verga said. For as long as anyone can remember, schools have taught children about physical health — food and nutrition, accidents and disease, mood-altering substances — but conspicuously absent has been the role mental health plays in a person's overall well-being.

"I think my students can identify when they're feeling stress or anxiety or something else, but I don't think they understand how to cope with it," he said. "They don't know that, just like you might need to rest if you're sick with the flu, you might need to take care of yourself if you're not feeling right mentally."”

https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/After-long-battle-mental-health-will-be-part-of-12531279.php

Ho finito di leggere da poco l’ultimo libro di John McPhee, classe 1931, il giornalista del New Yorker che ha creato buona parte della struttura e dello stile della Creative nonfiction. Il libro si intitola “Draft No. 4” ed è la raccolta di otto articoli sull’arte di scrivere articoli (e libri) di non-fiction già pubblicati dal New Yorker negli anni passati. È in inglese, lo consiglio vivamente a chi vuole deprimersi (se fa il giornalista) e a chi vuole vedere come funziona la macchina nella testa di John McPhee, che peraltro insegna giornalismo da una vita a Princeton e quindi ha influenzato una buona percentuale dei giornalisti “buoni” negli Stati Uniti

Un assaggio dal capitolo-articolo sulla struttura:

Money quote: “The picnic-table crisis came along toward the end of my second year as a New Yorker staff writer (a euphemistic term that means unsalaried freelance close to the magazine). In some twenty months, I had submitted half a dozen pieces, short and long, and the editor, William Shawn, had bought them all. You would think that by then I would have developed some confidence in writing a new story, but I hadn’t, and never would. To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure

Pagare le tasse. Pagarne più di quante se ne debbano pagare: impossibile al giorno d’oggi, dato che viviamo in una cultura che, all’opposto, stimola a pagarne quante meno legalmente possibile. Eppure l’antica Grecia ci insegna che, se lasciati alla libertà delle persone, i contributi fiscali diventano abbondanti. Insomma, che pagare su base volontaria sia meglio, come la legalizzazione per diminuire il consumo di droghe: è controintuitivo ma forse…

Money quote: “The rationale was that the rich should shoulder the expenses of the city, given the unequal share of the community’s wealth they enjoyed. Any contribution was not enforced by law or bureaucracy, but by tradition and public sentiment. The motivation of the liturgist was benevolence, a sense of public duty and – significantly – the reward of honour and prestige. If an assignment was carried out well, the patron’s standing among his fellow elites, as well as ordinary people, would rise. While in early ancient Greece only warriors could become ‘heroes’, later, liturgists could earn heroic status by acting in the public interest for the welfare of others. The result was that many gave more than was expected, as much as three or four times, a far cry from today’s culture of paying as little as legally possible.“

https://aeon.co/ideas/voluntary-taxation-a-lesson-from-the-ancient-greeks

Una nuova traduzione del Vangelo di San Paolo porta con sé - in inglese - una serie di cambiamenti anche importanti rispetto alle precendeti vulgate. Rileggerlo oggi, nell'ottica della singolarità, del momento in cui ibridare la mente biochimico-elettrica con la macchina digitale, nei giorni di Altered Carbon, diventa un divertentee scherzoso esercizio di stile.

Money quote: "The new age, moreover – when creation will be glorified and transformed into God’s kingdom – will be an age of ‘spirit’ rather than ‘flesh’. For Paul, these are two antithetical principles of creaturely existence, though most translations misrepresent the antithesis as a mere contrast between God’s ‘spirit’ and human perversity. But Paul is quite explicit: ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom.’ Neither can psychē, ‘soul’, the life-principle or anima that gives life to perishable flesh. In the age to come, the ‘psychical body’, the ‘ensouled’ or ‘animal’ way of life, will be replaced by a ‘spiritual body’, beyond the reach of death – though, again, conventional translations usually obscure this by speaking of the former, vaguely, as a ‘natural body’."

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-gospels-of-paul-dont-say-what-you-think-they-say

Nel fantastico mondo in cui da alcuni anni tutti viviamo, c'è il termine "disruption" che non ha pietà per nessuno. Adesso, neanche per la consulenza

Money quote: "An industry becomes susceptible to disruption when it becomes entrenched in its longstanding solutions and financial structure. Disruptive innovations provide simpler or more elegant solutions to existing problems, enabled by new technology and often at a lower cost. Think portable calculators versus computers, Amazon versus bookstores, Netflix versus Blockbuster, or digital cameras versus film.

Management consulting is not immune to the dynamics of disruption."

https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/the-business-consulting-industry-is-booming-and-it.html

Forse non lo sapevate (io non lo sapevo) ma c'è una ricca tradizione contemporanea di fantascienza e fantasy nel mondo islamico. Dopo le Mille e una notte, voglio dire.

Money quote: "By the early 20th century, speculative fiction from the Muslim world emerged as a form of resistance to the forces of Western colonialism. For example, Muhammadu Bello Kagara, a Nigerian Hausa author, wrote Ganďoki (1934), a novel set in an alternative West Africa; in the story, the natives are involved in a struggle against British colonialism, but in a world populated by jinns and other mystical creatures. In the following decades, as Western empires began to crumble, the theme of political utopia was often laced with a certain political cynicism. The Moroccan author Muhammad Aziz Lahbabi’s novel The Elixir of Life (Iksir al-Hayat) (1974), for example, centres on the discovery of an elixir that can bestow immortality. But instead of filling society with hope and joy, it foments class divisions, riots, and the unravelling of the social fabric.

An even darker brand of fiction has emerged from Muslim cultures today. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) reimagines Frankenstein in modern-day Iraq, among the fallout from the 2001 invasion. In this retelling, the monster is created from body parts of different people who have died because of ethnic and religious violence – and eventually goes on a rampage of its own. In the process, the novel becomes an exploration of the senselessness of war and the deaths of innocent bystanders."

https://aeon.co/ideas/think-sci-fi-doesnt-belong-in-the-muslim-world-think-again

Un progetto fotografico epico, decennale, che documenta culture (inglesi) che sopravvivono nonostante tutto e nonostante tutti. Un viaggio nei nostri immaginari culturali

Money quote: “‘Mod’ is an abbreviation for modernism, an umbrella term coined in the late 1950s to cover a set of intertwined subcultures – fashion, music, scooters, dancing – that carried an air of exclusivity. But it was also just a way for people to look like a million quid on the weekend, even if their bank balance didn’t necessarily reflect that”

http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/subcultures-mods-skins-lowriders-owen-harvey-photography/

Letture domenicali: una delle ultime interviste a Zygmunt Bauman fatta da ElPais. Social media, politica, relazioni. Un capolavoro.

Money quote: “We could describe what is going on at the moment as a crisis of democracy, the collapse of trust: the belief that our leaders are not just corrupt or stupid, but inept. Action requires power, to be able to do things, and we need politics, which is the ability to decide what needs to be done. But that marriage between power and politics in the hands of the nation state has ended. Power has been globalized, but politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off. People no longer believe in the democratic system because it doesn’t keep its promises. We see this, for example, with the migration crisis: it’s a global phenomenon, but we still act parochially. Our democratic institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of democratic institutions.”

https://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html

Recensione della batteria Anker 26800 PD con Usb-C, la migliore del momento - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/la-prova-della-batteria-anker-26800-pd-usb-c/