Reading

Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 03:50

A Masterful three-hour narrated audiobook set in the 1970s Third Doctor era, Terror of the Master, is being re-released in March 2023 as a standalone download from Big Finish Productions. In January 2021, the special limited edition anthology release from The Worlds of Doctor Who: Masterful celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first TV appearance […]

The post BIG FINISH: ‘Terror of the Master’ returns for a standalone download appeared first on Blogtor Who.

Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 03:39

By Dorothee Benz / Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting A recent guest essay in the New York Times (12/28/22) concluded a searing takedown of “our technology overlords” with the sentence: We have a technologically driven shift of power to ideological individuals and organizations whose lack of appreciation for moral nuance and good governance puts us all at […]

The post NYT Worries Big Brother Is Not Watching You appeared first on scheerpost.com.

Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 03:22
I’m developing a set of Mastermind lectures on economics, and the marketing has included video “shorts” from my interview with Lex Fridman. This one, on why socialist economies didn’t innovate as fast as capitalist ones drew a lot of ire on Twitter. The text of that short is: Innovations: Socialist versus Capitalism [Under capitalism] You … Continue reading "Why did socialism fail at product innovation and economic growth?"
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:42

As well as ripping a hole in the economy with her disastrous mini budget, her passionate rants about cheese and pork markets and, of course, being outlasted as prime minister by a head of lettuce, one of Liz Truss’s lesser-known legacies is the damage she caused to the Environment Agency (EA) in her time as […]

Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:29

Lowkey is joined by Professor David Miller, formerly of Bristol University and Zeeshan Ali, who runs the successful YouTube channel, Smile2Jannah, to discuss the power of the Israel Lobby, Jordan Peterson and the World Cup among other topics.

The post World Cup Racism, The Israel Lobby, and Jordan Peterson, with Smile 2 Jannah and David Miller appeared first on MintPress News.

Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:00
Net neutrality to sunset if Retained EU Law Bill is passed Retained Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill will wipe out net neutrality from UK law on 31 December this year. Anyone who cares about the Internet – and indeed who cares about freedom of expression and access to information online – should be […]
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:00

This Afterlife is A. E. Stallings’s new Selected Poems, drawing on her four full-length books, and including a “lagniappe” or bonus of previously uncollected poems and translations. Stallings, a poet who was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, has made Athens, Greece, her home for almost two decades. Her education in Classics, Latin, and Greek prepared her for a life preoccupied with the Grecian peninsula, but the move was not preordained—it’s rather as if her work over the years led her there, from her debut collection Archaic Smile, a book of rewritings of myths and riffs on sayings, her second book Hapax, her translations of Lucretius and Hesiod and George Seferis, on through her third book, Olives, and her fourth, the Pulitzer Prize finalist collection Like, which begins with an epigraph in Greek and a poem that responds to it. That the poem is a villanelle tells us on the one hand that she is a poet whose strongest work often emerges out of inherited forms, and that her sensibility was European before she herself knew it was—the poem recalls that journey in the slow boil of the villanelle, building, and recasting:

Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:00
And he is the rest of us Donald J. Trump is a catalyst not a cause. Trumpism and its nihilistic “Deep State” wreckers have deeper roots than the shallow, game-show grifter whose name attached to our grievance-fueled anti-democracy movement. There is more than polarization afoot, argues Brian Klaas, writing from Britain. Unlike the U.S., few in England buy into conspiracy theories. Here, polarization “plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral.” The paranoid style was with us since before Richard J. Hofstadter’s 1964 essay. Jared Yates Sexton argues that conspiratorial thinking found fertile ground in the New World and was present at the nation’s founding. Klaas compares the belief gap (The Atlantic): According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent.
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 00:00
In ancient Egyptian culture, images and words were in a state of constant oscillation between letters, sounds and things. Hieroglyphic letters require as much typographical standardisation as the letters of any alphabet in order to be read. What makes a beautiful image of an owl into a beautiful calligraphic letter M is rigorous formal regularisation; a perched bird turning its gaze directly towards you 𓅓.
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 00:00
Russia is fighting Ukraine about borders. This means that, as well as dodging bombs and getting used to living in the dark, residents of the border zone have to decide if they are ‘really’ Russian or ‘really’ Ukrainian. Some will no doubt be keeping the non-chosen identity in a trunk in the attic, to be retrieved in case of future need. But the logic of war is stern: those who choose to be Ukrainians are also opting to hate Russians as the enemy invader, while those in Ukraine who choose to be Russians are contemplating the possibility of having to move east.
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 00:00
Isaac Deutscher’s contributions to Workers’ Fight in 1940 fall short of an unambiguous rejection of revolutionary defeatism; it is possible that Tamara Deutscher altered her husband’s words, but without the original tape recording it’s hard to know for sure. What is clear, though, is that he couldn’t accept the social patriotism of the Labour Party and most people on the left: ‘This was just too trivial to me, too conventional and too obviously based on the normal bourgeois democratic assumptions and premises of their policies.’