Is Amazon Creating a Cultural Monopoly? - The New Yorker - 0 views
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“We are not experts in antitrust law, and this letter is not a legal brief. But we are authors with a deep, collective experience in this field, and we agree with the authorities in economics and law who have asserted that Amazon’s dominant position makes it a monopoly as a seller of books and a monopsony as a buyer of books.” (A monopoly is a company that has extraordinary control over supply as a seller of goods to consumers; a monopsony has extraordinary control over suppliers as a buyer of their goods.)
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a highly unorthodox argument: that, even though Amazon’s activities tend to reduce book prices, which is considered good for consumers, they ultimately hurt consumers
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U.S. courts evaluate antitrust issues very differently, nowadays, than they did a hundred years ago, just after antitrust laws were established to keep big corporations from abusing their power. Back then, judges tended to be largely concerned with protecting suppliers from being squeezed by retailers, which meant that, if a corporation exercised monopoly power to push prices down, hurting suppliers, the company could easily lose an antitrust case. But by the nineteen-eighties, the judiciary’s focus had shifted to protecting consumers, leading courts to become more prone to ruling in favor of the corporation, on the grounds that lower prices are good for consumers.
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A German Writer Translates a Puzzling Illness Into a Best-Selling Book - The New York T... - 0 views
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Back in 2007, after a series of mostly ineffective treatments prescribed by doctors, Ms. Enders, then 17, decided to take matters into her own hands. Convinced that the illness was somehow associated with her intestines, she pored over gastroenterological research, consumed probiotic bacterial cultures meant to aid digestion and tried out mineral supplements.
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The experiments worked (although she is not sure which one did the trick), leaving her with healthy skin and a newfound interest in her intestines. “I experienced with my own body that knowledge is power,” she writes of the episode in “Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ,”
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growing body of research indicating that our intestines may have a far greater influence on our feelings, decisions and behavior than previously realized. The primary evidence for this, Ms. Enders writes, is the vast network of nerves attached to our guts that monitors our deepest internal experiences and sends information to the brain, including to those regions responsible for self-awareness, memory and even morality.
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Narcissus Regards a Book - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views
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Common readers—which is to say the great majority of people who continue to read—read for one purpose and one purpose only. They read for pleasure. They read to be entertained. They read to be diverted, assuaged, comforted, and tickled.
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Reading, where it exists at all, has largely become an unprofitable wing of the diversion industry.
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it's not only the division of experience between hard labor and empty leisure that now makes reading for something like mortal stakes a very remote possibility.
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If It Feels Right - NYTimes.com - 3 views
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What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.
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you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.
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“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner.
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Goodness, I went through a bit of emotion reading that. Whew. Gotta center. Anyhoo, I feel certainly conflicted over the author's idea of "shallow values." Personally, I don't necessarily see the need to have a shared moral framework to connect to. What is this framework if not a system to instill shame and obligation into its members? While I do think it's important to have an articulate moral opinion on relevant subjects, I also think the world cannot be divided into realms of right or wrong when we can barely see even an infinitely small part of it at one time. What's wrong with open-mindedness?
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reader - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Reading, always a solitary affair, is increasingly a lonely one. A range of related factors have brought this to a head.
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Overall book sales have been anemic in recent years, declining 6 percent in the first half of 2013 alone. But the profits of publishers have remained largely intact; in the same period only one of what were then still the “big six” trade houses reported a decline on its bottom line. This is partly because of the higher margins on e-books. But it has also been achieved by publishers cutting costs, especially for mid-list titles.
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The “mid-list” in trade publishing parlance is a bit like the middle class in American politics: Anything below it is rarely mentioned in polite company. It comprises pretty much all new titles that are not potential blockbusters. But it’s the space where interesting things happen in the book world, where the obscure or the offbeat can spring to prominence, where new writers can make their mark.
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Eduardo Galeano Disavows His Book 'The Open Veins' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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For more than 40 years, Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” has been the canonical anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-American text in that region
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now Mr. Galeano, a 73-year-old Uruguayan writer, has disavowed the book, saying that he was not qualified to tackle the subject and that it was badly written. Predictably, his remarks have set off a vigorous regional debate, with the right doing some “we told you so” gloating, and the left clinging to a dogged defensiveness.
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‘Open Veins’ tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation,” Mr. Galeano said last month while answering questions at a book fair in Brazil, where he was being honored on the 43rd anniversary of the book’s publication. He added: “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me, this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can’t tolerate it
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How Reading Transforms Us - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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ere’s another kind of influence, not typically associated with writing, that works in a different fashion. Here, you don’t try to make people think or feel in any particular way. Instead, you try to get them to be themselves.
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Could a writer have an indirect influence of this kind, getting readers to think about themselves anew?
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in several studies over the past few years, we have found evidence that such influence is characteristic of literary art.
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Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds | The New Yorker - 0 views
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he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said.
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Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.
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In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug.
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When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans? - 0 views
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Is it helpful, or journalistically ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however unlikely they are? How much should a writer contextualize scary possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are, however speculative those probabilities may be?
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I also believe very firmly in the set of propositions that animated the project from the start:
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that the public does not appreciate the scale of climate risk
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In Defense of Facts - The Atlantic - 1 views
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over 13 years, he has published a series of anthologies—of the contemporary American essay, of the world essay, and now of the historical American essay—that misrepresents what the essay is and does, that falsifies its history, and that contains, among its numerous selections, very little one would reasonably classify within the genre. And all of this to wide attention and substantial acclaim
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D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it together from the headnotes that preface each selection, goes something like this. The conventional essay, nonfiction as it is, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts. The genre, as a consequence, has suffered from a chronic lack of critical esteem, and thus of popular attention. The true essay, however, deals not in knowing but in “unknowing”: in uncertainty, imagination, rumination; in wandering and wondering; in openness and inconclusion
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Every piece of this is false in one way or another.
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An Algorithm Isn't Always the Answer - The New York Times - 1 views
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in just about every aspect of my life I seek order and safety.
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Picture me on Tinder circa 2014.
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Here are my search criteria: I’m looking for men in my area (no farther than three miles away, because traveling is such a hassle and I take too many cabs as it is) who are anywhere from two years younger than me up to 10 years older (going on the assumption that women mature more quickly than men). And for goodness’ sake, my friends would tell me, find a man who isn’t a writer — they’re way too emotionally unstable. Certainly if I could check most of those items off the checklist, I’d find love or some good enough approximation of it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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Excellence Runs in the Family. Her Novel's Heroine Wants Something Else. - The New York... - 0 views
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Excellence Runs in the Family. Her Novel’s Heroine Wants Something Else
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Kaitlyn Greenidge and her sisters achieved success in their respective fields
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In her historical novel, “Libertie,” she focuses on a Black woman who doesn’t yearn to be the first or only one of anything.
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Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in | World news |... - 1 views
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Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political.
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accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.
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Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative.
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Why it's time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language | Language | T... - 0 views
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Now imagine that something even more fundamental than electricity or money is at risk: a tool we have relied on since the dawn of human history, enabling the very foundations of civilisation to be laid
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I’m talking about our ability to communicate – to put our thoughts into words, and to use those words to forge bonds, to deliver vital information, to learn from our mistakes and build on the work done by others.
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“Their language is deteriorating. They are lowering the bar. Our language is flying off at all tangents, without the anchor of a solid foundation.
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You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. - The New York Times - 0 views
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You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. By BRIAN X. CHEN At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who is attending the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. 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At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.
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Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who attended the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. (In addition,
I Actually Read Woody Allen's Memoir - The Atlantic - 0 views
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I’m a Woody Allen person, not because I disbelieve Dylan—in fact, I believe her. I’m a Woody Allen person because his movies helped shape me, and I can’t unsee them, the way I can’t un-read The Great Gatsby or un-hear “Gimme Shelter.” These are things that informed my sensibilities. All of them are part of me.
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As to our opinion about his past, one thing is for sure: He couldn’t care less about it. “Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public,” he says in the final lines of the book, “I prefer to live on in my apartment.”Exit laughing.
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the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which the Woody Allen character, distraught by his realization that there is no God and considering suicide, stumbles into a revival house to find the movie playing. He says in voice-over: The movie was a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and I always loved it. And I’m watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film. And I started to feel, How can you even think of killing yourself? I mean, isn’t it so stupid? I mean, look at all the people up there on the screen. They’re real funny—and what if the worst is true? What if there’s no God and you only go around once and that’s it? Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? I did.I do.
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The "missing law" of nature was here all along | Salon.com - 0 views
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recently published scientific article proposes a sweeping new law of nature, approaching the matter with dry, clinical efficiency that still reads like poetry.
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“Evolving systems are asymmetrical with respect to time; they display temporal increases in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior,” they continue, mounting their case from the shoulders of Charles Darwin, extending it toward all things living and not.
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To join the known physics laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, the nine scientists and philosophers behind the paper propose their “law of increasing functional information.”
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How will humanity endure the climate crisis? I asked an acclaimed sci-fi writer | Danie... - 0 views
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To really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future – then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson.
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read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade.
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The first lesson of his books is obvious: climate is the story.
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Grand Old Planet - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”
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Reading Mr. Rubio’s interview is like driving through a deeply eroded canyon; all at once, you can clearly see what lies below the superficial landscape. Like striated rock beds that speak of deep time, his inability to acknowledge scientific evidence speaks of the anti-rational mind-set that has taken over his political party.
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that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.
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