Longreads 2021
2021-09-30 11:20AM IST
The Truth, by Stanisław Lem | The MIT Press Reader by Stanisław Lem, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Lem's 1964 story, published in English for the first time, tells the tale of a scientist in an insane asylum theorizing that the sun is alive.
The meditative empathy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi - Vox by Constance Grady
There is something meditative about watching Piranesi live, the purity of his life and the kindness of it. And Piranesi’s kindness is possible in part because he lives in such communion with the House, which is his world. He respects the House and knows how to live within it, and in turn the House blesses him with its bounties.
The Sellout won the Booker Prize. This blistering passage on white male privilege shows why. - Vox by Constance Grady
In the end we found it impossible to ignore the impassioned pleas of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño’s prose ...
9 Fictional Friendships that Explore Male Intimacy - Electric Literature by Jackson Frons
At the fulcrum of Roberto Bolaño’s kaleidoscopic epic Savage Detectives, are the poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the author’s alter ego. The mysterious leaders of the Visceral Realists, drift through Spain, Israel, North Africa, and Mexico sharing an unspoken and often inscrutable bond as they phase in and out of contact
‘Heartbreak is part of doing anything you want to do’ | Paul Beatty | The Guardian, Kate Kellaway interviews Paul Beatty
You are wary of other people’s questions. What questions do you ask yourself?
I don’t ask myself big questions. I’ve a friend who was struggling, saying: “I don’t know why I am here… what is the purpose?” I said: “There is no purpose.” If there were a purpose, then I would be frozen.
Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama by Christian Lorentzen
Environmental despoliation, economic regression, and enthroned sexism and bigotry are already on the cards. For all the turmoil on our streets and abroad, literary historians may look back at the Obama years as a time of tranquility ...
Joan Didion: Only Disconnect Off Center: Essays by Barbara Grizzutti Harrison (1980).
I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator's having pleated instead of gathered her new diningroom curtains. These, and other assorted facts -- such as the fact that Didion chose to buy the dress Linda Kasabian wore at the Manson trial at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills -- put me more in mind of a neurasthenic Cher than of a writer who has been called America's finest woman prose stylist.
A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon | Vulture by Vulture Editors
A panel of critics tells us what belongs on a list of the 100 most important books of the 2000s … so far.
The World According to Peter Thiel - Erik Torenberg's Thoughts
His claim is that we've had this narrow cone of progress around the world of bits—around software & IT — but not atoms. The iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old & unchanged our current environment is. If you were to be in any room in 1973, everything would look the same except for our phones. This explains his old Founders Fund tagline: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
Zooming out, people don’t understand how important economic growth is. It’s the only thing sustaining the planet. Without it, we go into a malthusian war. Indeed: The only way our societies have worked for at least 250 years is by economic growth. Parliamentary democracies are built on an ever-expanding pie that they can continue subdividing. Once the pie is no longer expanding, everything turns zero-sum.
Cyberdecks For High-Tech Low-Lifes - The Dork Web
The term “Cyberdeck” was first coined in Gibson’s 1984 literary masterpiece, Neuromancer. He rewrote parts of Neuromancer several times after the release of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Blade Runner was based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Scott, Dick, Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, Goddard’s Alphaville and work by futurists such as Syd Mead and Moebius make the title of “father of Cyberpunk” hard to hang on Gibson alone. But he’s clearly a very important character in the development of Cyberpunk culture.
Just as Shakespeare brought in new words to describe new worlds, 1980s Gibson is Cyberpunk’s Great Bard. The Cyberdeck is just one of Gibson’s literary gifts. It’s the tool that lets Console Cowboys jack into the Matrix of Cyberspace and start hacking.
The anthropologist in an economist world - Altered States of Monetary Consciousness
Anthropology starts from the recognition that a person - in the first instance at least - cannot exist apart from a group. Put differently, anthropology assumes that a human network always precedes its individual members, and that care and reproduction precede any form of solo heroics. Human babies don’t survive long if they are left to fend for themselves, and - even if they miraculously survived without others - they would not be able to speak language, which would make all future social interaction, relationships and trade near-impossible.
The age-old strategy of buying cheap shares is faltering - Hacker News
the article is behind paywall, but the discussion at HN is interesting (premii)
Why You Should Use Component-Based Design in Unity
Let’s say that any weapon will have a component for damage, range, and projectiles (optional). Using Unity’s UI, you could create a weapon by dragging these components onto any GameObject and customizing the values of each one. Then, if the way projectiles are handled changes further into development, all you need to do is change one script, and all your weapons’ functionalities will be updated instead of just those defined at one level of a tree.
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