A Pleasurable Headache #48 - New number, who dis?
Intro
A purposefully short one this week, as I'm moving the newsletter over to a new provider. This is partially driven by the fact that TinyLetter is going to be gradually phased into MailChimp and secondly by the fact I have to jump through a lot of hoops week to week to get this thing to format properly in TinyLetter's editor. I'm after less friction, not more. If there are any problems with the newsletter, please let me know.
Links
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In the aftermath of those mysterious sound attacks in Cuba the authorities are none the wiser.
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A new take on the old take regarding Zero Dark Thirty.
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The Baffler has a great piece on Max Boot's new biography of Edwards Lansdale, putting many of its lies and deceptions to the sword.
"Of course, there’s a brutal irony to the fact that in order to defend a nation’s right to live in peace and freedom, we killed approximately two million of its citizens and propped up a dictatorship. Whether that irony is tragic or belongs to some less noble tradition, is not clear. For it to be truly tragic, it would have to have been unavoidable, part of a constitutive blindness in the American character."
"Yet another important concept in Indigenous cultures revolves around the “seventh generation stewardship” principle, which urges the current generation of humans to live and work for the benefit of the seventh generation into the future. The Great Law of the Iroquois urges us to consider whether the decisions we make today would benefit our children seven generations (about 140 years) into the future. This is frequently associated with the modern, popular concept of environmental stewardship or “sustainability,” but it is much broader in context. I believe it could equally apply to the decisions we make about AI."
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Part One of an excellent analysis by John Medhurst on American/British complicity in the 1953 Iranian coup. Part Two is available there too.
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Can free speech survive the internet?
"Disinterest is invisible on social media"
- Slow Thought: A Manifesto.
"The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on, you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could, however, be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection, and togetherness. There we will find real renewal."
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Eurogamer on the Great Kinect Art Heist, ingenious trickery or art based subterfuge?
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Jeff VanDerMeer on his writing process.
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Another article on leaving Twitter.
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This piece is pretty great:
"Yet this uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me that the flaws of youth — its ignorance, naïveté and passionate, Manichaean idealism — are also its strengths. Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them. They don’t understand how vast and intractable the forces that have shaped this world really are and still think they can change it. Revolutions have always been driven by the young."
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The making of Jordan Peele's Get Out.
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The Beat has a good write up of the editor-centric panel at ECCC.
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The evolution of paranoia on screen in the movies.
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A journalist returns to getting his news the old fashioned way.
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Finally, here are 100 easy things you can do to make women's lives easier.