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Created
Fri, 22/09/2023 - 00:30
Sic transit gloria mundi The Guardian on Wednesday: Rupert Murdoch loathes Donald Trump so much that the billionaire has not just soured on him as a presidential candidate but often wishes for his death, the author Michael Wolff writes in his eagerly awaited new book on the media mogul, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty. According to Wolff, Murdoch, 92, has become “a frothing-at-the-mouth” enemy of the 77-year-old former US president, often voicing thoughts including “This would all be solved if … ” and “How could he still be alive, how could he?” CNBC Thursday (today): Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of the board of both Fox Corp. and News Corp., the company said on Thursday. The move will be official in November. Murdoch, 92, will be appointed chairman emeritus of each company. Lachlan Murdoch, one of his sons, will become sole chairman of News Corp and will continue as Fox Corp.’s executive chair and CEO. “Our companies are in robust health, as am I,” the elder Murdoch said in a note to employees.
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Fri, 22/09/2023 - 00:00
‘You like poetry?’ he said. ‘Oh god,’ I said. ‘Alright, alright – one word then,’ he said. ‘One word?’ I said. ‘Yes, one ordinary word that you don’t need to think about.’ ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘that’s easy enough.’ ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good, darling.’ ‘Raw,’ I said. ‘Raw?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘now you have it.’ ‘I’m not sure I do though,’ he said. ‘Well I don’t know then,’ I said, ‘let’s just leave it.’
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Fri, 22/09/2023 - 00:00
The need for prosthetic brainpower has been apparent throughout human history, evidenced by the continual development of techniques and technologies to compensate for our biological inadequacies. The first number systems were developed around five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, making it possible for users to write down what memory might struggle to retain.
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Fri, 22/09/2023 - 00:00
Both James and Jahangir were obsessed with hunting, wilfully ensuring that court timetables were disrupted and dictated by the prolonged pursuit of prey, to the frustration of officials. Even so avid a huntsman as James might, however, have struggled to match the emperor’s claim in the Jahangirnama that, since the age of twelve, he had hunted 17,167 animals.
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Fri, 22/09/2023 - 00:00
The voice, the face and the gaze, all crucial to our ‘being with others’, are ‘disrupted and distorted’ by chatbots, artificial intelligence, eye tracking, iris scanning, facial coding and all the rest. ‘Pathways to a different world will not be found by internet search engines,’ Jonathan Crary states matter-of-factly. If there is to be a future, it will be offline.
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Fri, 22/09/2023 - 00:00
Is Bill Browder an oligarch? His critics think he ticks many of the boxes. He made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, profiting heavily from the newly privatised industries. He was a vocal supporter of Putin even after the dark truths of his regime had become clear, even after Putin had cracked down on numerous other oligarchs, and was allowed to continue to accumulate wealth – until suddenly he wasn’t.
Created
Fri, 22/09/2023 - 00:00
Was Shakespeare’s Cell an attempt posthumously to provide Shakespeare with an allegorised dwelling like Pope’s, identifying what the 18th century regarded as the excitingly lawless, archaic fecundity of Shakespeare’s poetic imagination with a psychic underworld of the sort hinted at in Twickenham?
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Thu, 21/09/2023 - 23:31

For twelve years starting in 1982, my partner and I in San Francisco joined with two friends in Seattle to produce Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, or LesCon for short. We started out typing four-inch columns of text and laying out what was to become a quarterly tabloid on a homemade light table. We used melted paraffin from an electric waxer to affix strips of paper to guide sheets the size of the final pages. Eventually, we acquired Macintosh computers, trekking to a local copy shop to pay 25 cents a page for laser-printed originals. We still had to paste them together the old-fashioned way to create our tabloid-sized pages. The finished boards would then go to a... Read more

Source: Stumbling Towards Old Age appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Thu, 21/09/2023 - 23:00
Remember the “red tsunami”? If you’re like me, you don’t answer the phone if you don’t recognize the number or, lately, the spoofed names. Which begs the question: Who does? People willing to speak with pollsters, I’d wager. Pollsters themselves will explain how they control for this bias, to be sure, but polling itself seems more and more a sucker’s game. Remember predictions last fall of a “red tsunami”? Chris Hayes made that point on Wednesday that the only polls that really matter are the ones voters participate in when they vote. Last night, people voted in elections in two different states. “Those results tell us way more about the state of our democracy and the political strength of the pro-democracy forces in this country than all of today’s other political headlines put together,” says @chrislhayes. pic.twitter.com/SVUPFJ3q1L — All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) September 21, 2023 What special elections around the country tell us is that the GOP is in a hole. And they’re still digging.