[moore] Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair in conversation … Go watch Moore and Sinclair discuss the Long London series including many of the non-fictional characters and locations within.
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[moore] Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair in conversation … Go watch Moore and Sinclair discuss the Long London series including many of the non-fictional characters and locations within.
[politics] What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat … How Noah Hawley caught hand, foot, and mouth disease by hanging out with billionaires. (archive link) ‘Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.’
[time] The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock … Go look at this mind-bending clock. ‘This clock displays the current time alphabetically. In Three-Hand mode, the hours, minutes, and seconds are each independently sorted by their English spelling, with a hand for each.’
[comics] The Oral History of the Scrapped 'Swamp Thing' Story 40 Years in the Making … The creators of Swamp Thing #88 get to tell the story of how it was cancelled and resurrected. It’s a shame we don’t get to hear from Karen Berger or Jenette Kahn. ‘According to Veitch, one early red flag emerged shortly after he took over as writer of Swamp Thing. “[DC] brought me down [to New York] and wined and dined me and took me to a Broadway play, and I got to meet with [DC President and Publisher] Jenette [Kahn]. This was right at the time when [DC] had tried to institute [their] standards and practices. They were trying to put the brakes on the violence and the sexuality that had been such a success with Dark Knight and Watchmen.” A year into Veitch’s run on the title, it was clear that something would have to give. “I think Jenette Kahn realized that the whole thing had blown up in her face. She wasn’t willing at that point to just get rid of [DC’s content standards], but she was telling people like me that it was not going to be a problem.”’
[royalty] Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite … More on the venality of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and family. ‘With the Yorks?, a whole new set of rules appear in the royal playbook. Chief among them is that one should seek, when explaining a personal fault, to pay oneself such a large compliment that it effectively kills the perception […]
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[royalty] Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite … More on the venality of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and family. ‘With the Yorks?, a whole new set of rules appear in the royal playbook. Chief among them is that one should seek, when explaining a personal fault, to pay oneself such a large compliment that it effectively kills the perception of the fault as being a fault at all. This was initially crucial for the duchess as part of her rehabilitation journey, or what she calls in one of her many books her attempt ‘to rebuild the brand Sarah’. The duchess blamed her ‘over-generous nature’ for her money troubles (in 2010 she had told the ‘fake sheikh’ she could ‘open any door’ to royalty for 500k with a downpayment of 40k). Her ‘fault’ (if it was one) was to give too much to the people in her life and land herself in hot water (silly old me). Andrew tried to pull off the same trick during his Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019, seeking to explain the reason he’d felt the need to fly to New York and stay with Epstein for three days just to tell him they could no longer be friends. ‘I admit fully that my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable,’ he said, to the disbelief of the entire world.’
[books] What's the point of hardbacks? … A London indie bookseller investigates why publishers still release hardback books first despite most readers seemingly preferring paperbacks. (via) ‘None of my conversations gave me any more reason to believe that readers want hardback novels. When I asked about their personal reading preferences, even my interviewees weren’t so keen on hardbacks. “I haven’t read a hardback in years,” said Jim Gill. Kay Peddle called paperbacks “the ultimate format”: cheap, portable and with “no pressure to keep it pristine. Sand, grime and dog ears all add to the charm”.’
[cthulhu] President Nyarlathotep Is Simply Engaging in Classic “Mad Outer God” Negotiating Tactics … ‘But—and just hear me out here—the American voters did resummon Nyarlathotep because enough of us remain enthralled by his unfettered madness, wanton cruelty, and nonsensical brinkmanship. This is classic Negotiating 101 courtesy of the Faceless God himself! Sure, he may have kicked it up a notch from “sheer madness” to “abject depravity,” but that’s for the pundits to debate. That said, yes, it seems like the promise to “fill every womb with salt and every testicle with spiders” is sort of backfiring.’
[life] The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done … Oliver Burkeman on how Darwin, Dickens, Virginia Woolf and others all topped out at about four hours of real mental work a day. ‘The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your […]
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[life] The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done … Oliver Burkeman on how Darwin, Dickens, Virginia Woolf and others all topped out at about four hours of real mental work a day. ‘The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to “maximise your time” or “optimise your day”, in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are highest). Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don’t worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.’
[void] The Void Would Very Much Like You to Stop Screaming Into It … ‘It is, I’ll admit, entirely possible he’ll start another war, or several wars, or even a world war because Melania finally escaped, or his sons were revealed to be Uday and Qusay Hussein in disguise, or something. But he’s just one […]
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[void] The Void Would Very Much Like You to Stop Screaming Into It … ‘It is, I’ll admit, entirely possible he’ll start another war, or several wars, or even a world war because Melania finally escaped, or his sons were revealed to be Uday and Qusay Hussein in disguise, or something. But he’s just one guy. One freaking guy. You have got to stop coming here, day after day, screaming into me about him. Especially using that many curse words. I think we can both admit at this point that the screaming isn’t working. The screaming isn’t making you feel any better.’
[epstein] Rich Brain … How Epstein’s emails reveal the super-rich’s obsession with preserving their wealth. ‘Something middle-class people may not realize is that an age of yawning inequality actually makes very rich people more anxious, too. Once again, you might imagine a liberating effect of extreme wealth. But that isn’t how it turns out to […]
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[epstein] Rich Brain … How Epstein’s emails reveal the super-rich’s obsession with preserving their wealth. ‘Something middle-class people may not realize is that an age of yawning inequality actually makes very rich people more anxious, too. Once again, you might imagine a liberating effect of extreme wealth. But that isn’t how it turns out to work. The cost of sinking into the below-ground becomes more unimaginable. The abyss becomes more terrifying. And, therefore, changes to the system, higher taxes, rising populist tides — all of it is terrifying. Wealth taxation, specifically, like the new proposal from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna for a 5 percent annual wealth tax on America’s nearly 1,000 billionaires, triggers especially visceral feelings. The billionaire class often takes it like a punch in their grandson’s stomach.’
[tv] ‘I wrote The Sopranos to get over my mother wishing me dead’: David Chase on his mob masterpiece – and his new LSD epic… David Chase interviewed by Stuart Heritage. ‘Chase is such good company that I could happily while away the afternoon getting into the weeds about MKUltra. But our time is running […]
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[tv] ‘I wrote The Sopranos to get over my mother wishing me dead’: David Chase on his mob masterpiece – and his new LSD epic… David Chase interviewed by Stuart Heritage. ‘Chase is such good company that I could happily while away the afternoon getting into the weeds about MKUltra. But our time is running out, so I return to the reason why he’s here. The Sopranos is such a foundational show, shaping our culture in ways we no longer even notice, that I ask Chase what he considers to be its legacy. Fourteen seconds pass in total silence as he considers his answer. “Well, hopefully it’s that God is in the details,” he offers.’
