Hello, here’s this week’s list.
- Making Modern Toughness - Something I ponder about a lot.
“Today’s students are more accomplished than past generations, but they are also more emotionally fragile.” - The Secret Nazi Attempt to Breed the Perfect Horse -
Very nice piece detailing why (and how) the Germans did what they planned to do. It’s (slightly) scary when one thinks of the lengths the Nazis went to establish dominance. So much insecurity? - Fear of the light: why we need darkness - Very nice Guardian piece about light pollution and what a life without true darkness means for the new urban humanity.
“I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1856. He understood those worlds as separate, but in some essential conversation with each other – to receive one without the other was to misunderstand both. But what happens when mankind divorces itself from a true experience of the cosmos, separating from the vastness above, taming it by erasing it? How can we ever come to know a heaven we can barely see? - How it feels to be an artist. - Short (three paragraphs), but echoes sentiments that anyone should have gone through when making or creating anything at all.
This is the most unusual thing about being an artist: that at the very same time that it appears to matter more than anything, it doesn’t matter at all. - Private lives are exposed as WikiLeaks spills its secrets - WikiLeaks publishes everything it receives, with little or no curation. Not only do they publish government secrets, but they also publish private things about normal citizens that scar them for their entire lives. Should they be more careful?
- Why Europe Can’t Find The Jihadis In Its Midst - Buzzfeed continuing on its string of impressive longform journalism. Good read if you’re interested in ISIS, terror and its state in the EU right now.
- The Real-Life Superhero Who Beats the Cops to Bike Thieves - Really loved this! He’s called Bike Batman. How apt.
In short, the guy showed no crime-fighting predilection—certainly no inkling to become a vigilante who would face off against criminals while armed with little more than a smartphone, some spare time, and a pair of brass balls. He didn’t choose to become Bike Batman.
Sometimes in life, though, the cape finds you. - ‘Freddie Mercury was a prodigy’: Rock star’s Panchgani school bandmates remember ‘Bucky’
He was a prodigy. He could play anything! He had the unique ability to listen to a song on the radio, just once, and be able to play it perfectly. Our favourite programme was the Binaca Hit Parade, which was broadcast every Wednesday, if I remember correctly. If we heard a new song and liked it, Freddie would quickly learn the chords, and I would scribble down the words. And it would be the Hectics’ next hit number. Simple! - Ed Smith And The Imagination Machine: The Untold Story Of A Black Video Game Pioneer - Superb article about just what the article says - a rare breed that is a black video game pioneer. Rare not because they can’t do well, but because they’re just not allowed to.
- Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable? - We’ve got artificial intelligence tools that work well, and are even inspired by biological systems like nervous systems and neurons. They sometimes know us better than our friends and family, and we might never even know how these tools exactly work. Scary?
- I grew up in Pablo Escobar’s Colombia. Here’s what it was really like. - Great read. I haven’t watched the critically acclaimed series Narcos yet, but I enjoyed reading this anyway. Gives you some chills.