“Waxing Your Balls for Social Justice” in Taki’s Magazine
“The Secret Life of Smell and What Dogs Can Teach Us About Accessing Hidden Layers of Reality” by Maria Popova in Brain Pickings
The latest issue of AWAI’s Barefoot Writer
In this issue:
* “Tranf0rm Your Writing Dream into a Custom-Fit, Joy-Provoking, Money-Generating Reality in 9 Simple Steps”
* “Where Limitations, Hurdles, and a Lack of Clients Doesn’t Matter”
* “On Dying, Mothers, and Fighting for Your Ideas”
* “’Moonwalking’ Your Projects for Better, Smarter, Faster Results”
The latest issue of Independent Healing: “Don’t Fall for the Great American Heart Hoax…”
In the October issue, you’ll discover clear evidence that conventional medicine’s two main weapons against heart disease – stents and statins – don’t work.
First, you’ll learn:
* Why heart attack survival rates go up when top cardiologists leave town.
* That heart patients who get stents are more likely to suffer heart attacks than those who don’t.
* Big Pharma’s statistical scam that makes statins look like miracle drugs when they are actually ineffective and even harmful for the vast majority of people who take them.
* That cutting cholesterol does not prevent heart attacks. In fact, 75% of heart attack victims have normal levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol.
And then you’ll learn what does work: a simple, science-backed plan that prevents and treats American’s number one killer naturally, without drugs or procedures.
“The White-Collar Job Apocalypse That Didn’t Happen” in The New York Times
The article refutes the claim that the USA was in a long-term trend of losing jobs to overseas operations.
More than a million low-skilled jobs like data entry did move offshore over the past 10 years. But these were mostly jobs located in high-salary cities on both coasts. Middle-skilled jobs, such as customer service and sales, did not diminish. In fact, they increased. White-collar jobs have also increased.
This would not be surprising if, before publishing their predictions, the academics had consulted with actual businesspeople involved in “exporting” jobs. My colleagues and I, for example, could have told them that you cannot maintain the same level of customer service by setting up operations in India and the Philippines. The article doesn’t say this. (It was in the NYT, after all.) But the main reason wasn’t the difference in time (as the article suggests) but the level of skill and the work ethic of these countries with cheap labor.
Toward the end of the article, the issue of automation and robotics is mentioned. This is certainly a serious threat to employment everywhere. My guess is that these technological advances will have the same effect as they’ve always had: making many jobs obsolete while creating many more.
Fight No More by Lydia Millet
This is a collection of interconnected short stories by a very good writer. The stories are told through the perspective of Nina, a high-end real estate broker. Each chapter is located in a different house and opens up a different micro-culture of America – or at least LA. It’s social satire, and it is smart and funny. My one objection: It has the Hollywood angle to it, where all the teenagers are precocious brats, all the men are monsters, and all the women are heroic.
“The Qualities of a Leader” in Taki’s Magazine
Theodore Dalrymple is the sort of writer that makes me wish I knew him.
“Who Cut the Balls Off San Francisco” in Taki’s Magazine
“Writing as the Cat Purrs: Ten Tips” on BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog
Brevity publishes mostly banal stuff, but this essay is worth a read if writing is part of your game. Smart and funny.
Cathay by Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound was one of my favorite poets in college and even in graduate school. I loved his imagist poems and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” and was awed by “The Cantos.” But the poems that broke my heart were the 15 classical Chinese poems that he translated for this collection (published in 1915).
Pound could not read Chinese fluently, so based his translations on the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, an American who had studied Chinese under a Japanese teacher. For me, that’s not a problem. For me, the poems in Cathayare Pound’s.