Month: August 2016
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Listening in — a short review of “Between the World and Me”
When I think of my long struggle to “try and be a writer”, my confidence is shattered upon reading such a poetic, insightful, heartfelt piece as this. This is writing — the naked intimacy of it. Even if I cannot fully grasp the primordial fear documented in this book, Coates’s excellent writing gives me a…
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C.R.E.A.M.
The War on Cash is an informative piece about the battle against the cashless society. I have been cash-only for a few years, mainly for two reasons: protecting my personal information and financial discipline. In the old days, a transaction would involve two parties: a merchant and a customer. Nowadays, barely a transaction is processed…
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Clausewitz Roundtable released as book
Many years ago I participated in an inter-blog (and very detailed!) discussion of the military classic On War by Carl von Clausewitz. The proceedings of that endeavour have been collated into 553 page book, released this week by Ever Victorious Press. I submitted three chapters under my alias at the time “Sir Francis Younghusband.” My…
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More people than bots?
In 1975, BusinessWeek magazine imagined the rise of the paperless office as computer use became more widespread. Of course, over the following two decades, consumption of paper doubled. A couple more decades on, we are finally seeing year-on-year decreases in office paper use, at least in North America and Europe. One recent tech fascination is…
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Against “commodified fantasy”
From the Foreword of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea:
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Minimalist wall-hangings
People who think I am a downsizing/minimalist fundamentalist, are surprised when they come into my livingroom and see a number of wall hangings. We don’t have many, but almost all of them are handpainted art (like the family portrait featured in this post). They are all gifts, and have a personal touch. For example, the…