2014-04-22 (Tuesday)

Links

1. Roger Angell: Life in the Nineties : The New Yorker

   Really lovely piece by 93-year-old Roger Angell about being 93. Have a read. (via Kottke)

2. Happiness Is a Worn Gun | Harper’s Magazine

   Thinking about what it’s like to carry a gun around, and pondering the arguments for/against gun ownership and open or concealed carry.

3. John McPhee: Structure : The New Yorker

   About ways to structure non-fiction, and the text editor he’s always used, Kedit. A really good read. (via Migurski)

4. How Britain exported next-generation surveillance — Matter — Medium

   Finally got round to reading James’s piece on Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. It’s odd to think of this vast network of vision and computation churning away monitoring live and historical movements of people, invisibly.

5. Adam Green: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins, Pickpocket : The New Yorker

   (Jan 2013) Not only good on how Apollo Robbins does his amazing pickpocketing but I also liked its description of the different things he tries to make a paying (legal) career out of it.

6. They’re Taking Over! by Tim Flannery | The New York Review of Books

   About how jellyfish are filling the oceans, destroying everything else, and are really hard to fight (they’re still a problem when they’re dead). A bit longer and more interesting than the LRB review of the same book.

7. Andrew O’Hagan · Ghosting: Julian Assange · LRB 6 March 2014

   This very long piece about failing to ghost-write Julian Assange’s biography is as good as everyone said it was.

8. The Task Rabbit Economy

   (Oct 2013) Suggestions for fixing non-Nordic Western (specifically US) economies. It’s not technology, TaskRabbit et al, increasing inequality, but capitalism.

9. Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

   Interesting to read about them trying to work out what kind of education MOOCs are best suited to (university? Pre-university? Professional training?). I start to think the traditional boxes are less and less useful.

10. Amazon unpacked - FT.com

    From February 2013, on the poor-quality jobs Amazon is creating and the disappointment of many local people near their Rugeley warehouse. There is, though, something to be written about people disliking Amazon’s working conditions and fondly remembering… coal mining. (via Dan W)

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