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Are you tired of not being rich?

Do you want to make thousands of extra dollars every month without breaking a sweat?

Great news: all you need to do is commit an extra forty to fifty hours a week to intense work outside your full-time job, and you, too, can make passive income.

I know, I know: it sounds too good to be true. At first, I couldn’t believe that I could make a comfortable living without giving up my free time. And you know what? I was right to feel that way. I couldn’t give up my free time—it had to be spent working. But that’s how you make passive income: by staying up twenty-four hours a day working nonstop, destroying your relationships with friends and loved ones, and eliminating any spare time you might have to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Some people have asked me, “Are you sure you understand what the word ‘passive’ means?”

And it’s during those moments that, instead of asking me a question like that, they could have been working to make even more passive income. Are you starting to get it? Are you starting to see the vision? Are you starting to believe?

It appears that Trump is getting no love from the judge in his NY civil trial: A New York judge—unmoved by the incessant pleas from Donald Trump’s legal team to delay trial—made quick work of the former president’s last-minute request Tuesday night to push back his first big upcoming trial for bank and tax fraud. On Wednesday morning, Justice Arthur F. Engoron pulled out a pen and scribbled a nine-word remark at the bottom of the draft order that Trump’s lawyers wanted him to sign, rejecting it outright. “Decline to sign; Defendants’ arguments are completely without merit,” Engoron wrote, signing it with his trademark ligature “Æ.” The Trump family is now less than four weeks away from the start of a monumental civil trial in which AG Letitia James seeks to siphon at least $250 million away from the Trump Organization over accusations that it routinely inflated asset values and lied on official paperwork. Will he be called to testify? Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka? Could be …

I’ve signed an agreement to write a book about ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media. ActivityPub is the protocol for connecting social networks across the Web; it’s what currently underpins Mastodon and will be used by Threads.net. The book should be available sometime after summer 2024. The book will be a developer guide that will help programmers … Continue reading ActivityPub Book for O’Reilly Media →

Plea deals offered and rejected Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff reminds those still on “formerly known as Twitter” that the Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy could have taken plea offers. Seditious conspiracy is notoriously tough to prove, as the the Department of Justice found in the Hutaree Militia case. The Proud Boys may have betted their seditious conspiracy prosecution would fail too. Except theirs (and the damage they wrought) was so public and so thoroughly documented on thousands of video clips even before prosecutors obtained emails, phone records, and cooperation from witnesses, that there is little comparison to the Hutaree, “almost a gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” The “Boys” now have twice as much jail time than they might have to contemplate their miscalculation (if not their sins). And to ponder why that six-foot-three inches and 215 pounds of rippling man-flesh named Trump, to whom they pledged so much allegiance, passed on pardoning them on his way out of the White House.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 18 (Friday 08 September 2023)

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 18 (Friday 08 September 2023)

Data and statistics, all of them, are man-made. They are also central to modern politics and governance, and the ways we talk about them. That in itself represents a shift. Discussions that were once about values and beliefs – about what a society wants to see when it looks at itself in the mirror – have increasingly turned to arguments about numbers, data, statistics. 

In the centuries between the reigns of Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II, hundreds of chartered companies sought to profit from and extend the empire. Although few came close to the Hudson Bay Company or East India Company’s durability or profitability, they lumpily but inexorably advanced British sovereignty all the same.

Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science. Religion should vacate public life, except as an inner psychological ‘vocation’ through which individuals commit to their life course. The tragedy of modernity, as recognised most acutely by Nietzsche, is that modern knowledge can tell us a great deal about how the world works (facts), but nothing whatever about what we should do about it (values).

We may understand less about orcas than they do about us. The example of Twofold Bay suggests they are able to understand human desire and intention, at least when it overlaps with theirs.

Society itself is a satirist and a thief; what it steals is the person you are. James Gillray’s mischief was of an unusual sort, at once refined and coarse, and sometimes with an opacity hard to penetrate even after several looks. 

Sending venom through the post, rather than using email or social media, today appears an old-fashioned gesture. The laptop provides easier options. Yet abusive letters haven’t altogether gone away, and receiving one now might feel even more uncomfortable. 

Nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came to the throne in 1216, already weeping, in circumstances that would have taxed a Churchill or a Napoleon. Henry III laboured all through his long reign under a doubly damnable inheritance, at least from the point of view of someone who never stopped wanting to be an absolute monarch.

John had a famous younger brother, Augustus John, and a famous older lover, Auguste Rodin. Her pictures are, on the whole, characterised by restraint of tone and technique. There are not very many of them. She lived quietly. She was a Catholic. She was a woman.

The geopolitical impact of the Prussian-German victory was profound. For centuries, the German centre of Europe had been politically fragmented and weak. The continent had been dominated by the states on its periphery, whose interest was in maintaining the power vacuum at the centre. Now, for the first time, the centre was united and strong.

Reconstituting the totality of a person knowing only the “parts” of his or her mind is equally nonsensical.

In Hazzard’s fiction there are very few children, and the ones who do appear are not particularly rewarding. But they are not the enemy. The enemy is the person who sees others as playthings. The enemy is the writer.

There is a moral here, if we like this sort of thing, and Petzold would no doubt say we are entitled to our liking. That’s what abeyance is about. Self-absorbed people have to learn about the lives of others, about pain and difference and surprise.

‘I am a better translator than he is,’ Willa Muir complained in a 1953 journal. For several generations the couple’s Kafka translations were the most widely read English-language versions. Early editions of The Castle were described as being ‘translated by Edwin and Willa Muir’, but by the 1970s the title page of the Penguin Classics edition had reversed the order of the translators’ names.

The trick that Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings plays is to make us think we’re reading a certain kind of novel, before wrongfooting us. Crime narratives are appealing not just because they’re lurid and shocking, but because they’re well-behaved: they obey generic conventions, stick to an internal logic.

Obtaining citizenship by descent can be especially complicated – logistically, emotionally and politically. Collecting the documents that prove a connection to a parent or grandparent usually involves talking to relatives who may or may not want to talk to you. It may involve dredging up stories that families would rather keep quiet.

Russia's attack on a crowded market in Kostiantynivka was the latest in a long line of mass casualty strikes that have been inflicted on Ukrainian citizens