Sunday, January 15, 2023

15: Nepal

Are Protein Bars Actually Good for You? Or are they just glorified candy bars? The global market for protein bars is growing quickly and expected to swell to more than $2 billion by the end of 2026 ........ “We’ve just gone completely off the rails with protein in recent years” ........ Despite the advertising, though, nutrition experts say that protein bars aren’t all that healthy. ........ “We value protein so much that it’s the central thing on our plate” ...........

You’d be hard-pressed to find an American who actually needs more protein, though

........ Most meat eaters get far more than the recommended daily dose of protein (which is about 0.4 grams per pound of body weight). And those who don’t eat meat can get enough protein from plant sources like tofu, nuts and legumes. ......... many protein bars are also full of sugar. ....... A Gatorade protein bar in the flavor chocolate chip contains 28 grams of added sugars, twice the amount in a Dunkin’ Donuts chocolate frosted doughnut with sprinkles. .......... “By and large, they’re highly processed, high in sugar and salt — kind of a ‘Frankenfood’” ........ grapes, a banana, an apple or yogurt with berries ....... a handful of nuts ....... tuna or hard-boiled eggs, which are high in protein but not processed.

Kellyanne Conway: The Cases for and Against Trump Shrugging off Mr. Trump’s 2024 candidacy or writing his political obituary is a fool’s errand — he endures persecution and eludes prosecution like no other public figure. That could change, of course, though that cat has nine lives. ........ It’s tough to be new twice. ........ A popular sentiment these days is, “I want the Trump policies without the Trump personality.” ......... it was a combination of his personality and policies that forced Mexico to help secure our border; structured new trade agreements and renewed manufacturing, mining and energy economies; pushed to get Covid vaccines at warp speed; engaged Kim Jong-un; played hardball with China; routed ISIS and removed Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander; forced NATO countries to increase their defense spending and stared down Mr. Putin before he felt free to invade Ukraine. ......... When it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see. ........ what some perceive as an abrasive, scornful man bent on despotism, others see as a candid, resolute leader unflinchingly committed to America’s interests. ...... until one faces the klieg lights, and is subjected to raw, relentless, often excessive scrutiny, and unfair and inaccurate claims, there is no way to suss out who possesses the requisite metal and mettle. ........ Trump boasts that his general election win-loss record was 233-20 and that he hosted some 30 rallies in 17 states and more than 50 fund-raisers for candidates up for re-election, and participated in 60 telerallies and raised nearly $350 million in the 2022 cycle for Republican candidates and committees. .......... For seven years Mr. Trump hasn’t stopped campaigning .

Republicans Are Getting It Wrong About DeSantis and Florida After his commanding performance in the midterm elections, I informally polled my conservative family members in Miami, who all said they had dumped Mr. Trump and were on team DeSantis for ’24. One colorfully called the former president she had voted for twice a “whiny crybaby” who could only talk about losing the last election. .......... Florida now has the fastest-growing population in the country ........ “People vote with their feet,” he said. “We are proud to be a model for the nation, and an island of sanity in a sea of madness.” ........ Florida is not a model for the nation, unless the nation wants to become unaffordable for everyone except rich snowbirds. .......... Florida is underwater demographically. Most of those flocking there are aging boomers with deep pockets, adding to the demographic imbalance for what is already one of the grayest populations in the nation ....... All of the new arrivals have contributed to a growing unaffordability crisis in Florida. You can see it everywhere ......... Eighty-year-old wooden bungalows nearby now go for almost $2 million, and glitzy new projects have moved into historically Black neighborhoods like Little Haiti, pushing out local people. ......... While Mr. DeSantis has been busy limiting what can be taught in schools, flying immigrants to Northern states and punishing “woke” Disney, working-class Floridians are being priced out of many Florida cities. Miami now surpasses Los Angeles and New York City as the least-affordable city for housing in the United States, and joining it in the top five is the once working-class South Florida Cuban-American bastion of Hialeah. Miami is also second in income inequality, with levels roughly comparable with Colombia’s and Panama’s. .........

Florida is having many of the same problems as its liberal archnemesis California

......... More than 76 percent of Floridians live on the coasts .



Date Like a Monk ‘We’re not here to impress each other. We’re here to connect.’ ........ The Sanskrit word for monk, brahmacharyi, means “the right use of energy.” ......... my practice teaches that we all have a limited amount of energy, which can be directed in multiple directions or one. When energy is scattered, it’s difficult to create momentum or impact. ......... If you haven’t developed a deep understanding of your motivations and obstacles, it’s harder to move through life with patience and compassion. ......... During college in London, I had devoted so much time to a long-distance girlfriend that I missed most of my classes. Celibacy allowed me to use that time and space to understand myself and develop the ability to still my mind. .......... When I left the ashram for good, I hadn’t watched TV, seen a movie, or listened to music in three years. I didn’t know who had won the World Cup or who the Prime Minister of England was. ....... The night was going to cost me nearly a week’s income, and I wanted it to be perfect. ........ She smiled politely, but she wasn’t eating much. ....... Monks never try to impress anyone. As a monk, you strive to master your ego and your mind. We think love is its own puzzle ........ when you explore the dark lanes of your own mind, as monks are trained to do, you develop patience, understanding and compassion toward yourself, which you can then bring to all your relationships. Going through the process of learning to love yourself, as monks are also trained to do, teaches you how to love someone else. ........ what she actually said: “I’d be perfectly happy to go to a grocery store and buy some bread.” ......... My monk teachers never tried to impress me and never wanted me to impress them. ........ you’re never better or worse than anyone else ........ Her grandmother worried I would leave her and return to the ashram. Her friends assumed I was against watching TV or going to movies and imagined that all we could do together was sit and meditate. ......... monk training is mind training ......... I haven’t gone back to eating meat or drinking alcohol ....... it opened my mind to understanding and acceptance. .......... I respected that everyone was moving at their own pace, in their own time. My way wasn’t right or wrong; they weren’t too slow or too fast. I learned to see the essence of a monk in everyone I met. Everyone has a part of themselves that is compassionate, loving and beautiful. .......... She was more of a monk than I would ever be, and we didn’t need a fancy restaurant to connect. For our next date, I took her to an outdoor ropes course, where we helped each other swing from trees, climb walls and walk narrow balance beams. We were bowing to each other, in our way. ........ The monks, who say nothing about romantic love, had taught me everything I needed to know about romantic love.

Electric Vehicles Keep Defying Almost Everyone’s Predictions Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022 ........ There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020. ........ what looked not that long ago like a climate pipe dream is now undeniably underway: a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation. ........ a net zero transportation sector by 2050 ....... In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. .......... Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share ..........

market share of E.V.s will approach 40 percent by the end of the decade

.......... In the United States, investments in battery manufacturing reached a record $73 billion last year — three times as much as the previous record, set the year before. Globally, battery manufacturing capacity grew almost 40 percent last year, and is projected to grow fivefold by just 2025. By that year, lithium mining is expected to be triple what it was in 2021. .......... many other areas of the green transition experiencing similarly shocking exponential or quasi-exponential growth: renewable energy investments in the United States quadrupling in a decade, global investments in clean tech growing more than 30-fold over the same period, a solar supply chain already big enough to facilitate a total transition ........... the world hasn’t undertaken a breakneck allover revolution like this ever before in its history. .......... like carbon itself, which hangs in the air for centuries at least — dirty cars stay on the road for a very long time, emitting all the while............ demand already outstrips supply ........ China produces about 75 percent of all E.V. battery cells, manufactures roughly the same share of those cell components and does more refining of many of the biggest raw inputs than the rest of the world combined. ........ At what point do gas stations become unprofitable, and what happens then? ........... But there, at least for now, the electric vehicle revolution is taking a very different shape — often with two or three wheels rather than four. Globally, there are 10 times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the road as true electric cars, accounting already for almost half of all sales of those vehicles and responsible already for eliminating more carbon emissions than all the world’s four-wheel E.V.s. ......... In 2020, Americans bought twice as many e-bikes as they did E.V.s. .

The Dystopia We Fear Is Keeping Us From the Utopia We Deserve usable nuclear fusion remains, optimistically, decades away. ....... humanity courts calamity if we don’t respect our limits and discard fantasies of endless growth. ....... the third possible goal:

a world of energy abundance

. ........ His titular flying car stands in for all that we were promised in the mid-20th century but don’t yet have: flying cars, of course, but also lunar bases, nuclear rockets, atomic batteries, nanotechnology, undersea cities, affordable supersonic air travel and so on. Hall harvests these predictions and many more from midcentury sci-fi writers and prognosticators and sorts them according to their cost in energy. What he finds is that the marvels we did manage — the internet, smartphones, teleconferencing, Wikipedia, flat-screen televisions, streaming video and audio content, mRNA vaccines, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, to name just a few — largely required relatively little energy and the marvels we missed would require masses of it. .............. The water crises of the future could be solved by mass desalination. Supersonic air travel is a solved technological problem. Lunar bases lie well within the boundaries of possibility. ........ an “ergophobic” society, which he defines as a society gripped by “the almost inexplicable belief that there is something wrong with using energy.” .......... The true conflict, he says, is not between the haves and the have-nots but between the doers and the do-nots. “The do-nots favor stagnation and are happy turning our civilization into a collective couch potato,” he writes. And in his view, the do-nots are winning. ............ the villainy of lawyers and regulators and hippies. .......... He predicts that if solar and wind “prove actually usable on a large scale,” environmentalists would turn on them. “Their objections really have nothing to do with pollution, or radiation, or risk, or global warming,” he writes. “They are about keeping abundant, cheap energy out of the hands of ordinary people.” ........... the Deploy Solar and Wind Everywhere and Invest in Every Energy Technology We Can Think of Act. ............. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. ........ We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible. ........... “Take any variable of human well-being — longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population — and draw a graph of its value over time,” Charles Mann writes in “The Wizard and the Prophet.” “In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the 18th and 19th centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil and natural gas.” .............. visitors to the Palace of Versailles in February 1695 marveled at the furs worn to dinners with the king and the ice that collected on the glassware. It was freezing in Versailles, and no amount of wealth could fix it. .............. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a vast wine collection and library in Monticello and the forced labor of hundreds of slaves, but his ink still froze in his inkwells come winter. ......... Today, heating is a solved problem for many. But not for all. There are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality. ............ 2010 ....... roughly two billion people had little or no access to electricity and still cooked food and heated water by fire. About three billion had access to enough electricity to power electric lights. An additional billion or so had the energy and wealth for labor-saving appliances like washing machines. It’s only the richest billion people who could afford to fly, and they — we — used around half of global energy. .............. “You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books.” There is no global aid strategy we could pursue that would do nearly as much as making energy radically cheaper, more reliable and more available. ......... “Flights that take 15 hours on a 747 could happen in an hour on a point-to-point rocket” .......... Vertical greenhouses could feed far more people, and desalination, which even now is a major contributor to water supplies in Singapore and Israel, would become affordable for poorer, populous nations that need new water sources most. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more plausible ......... definition of superabundance ............... but the combination of fixed-price for infinite compute and the new trend of inefficient but modular technology has created an inventor out of almost everybody. ........... longevity drugs, which can only be synthesized in pristine zero-G conditions. Then you scoot off to a last-minute meet-up with friends in Tokyo. .......... dinner (made from ingredients grown in the same building and picked five minutes before cooking) ......... You bask in yet another serendipitous, in-person interaction, grateful for your cross-continental relationships. ........... it is not just fusion. The advance of wind and solar and battery technology remains a near miracle. The possibilities of advanced geothermal and hydrogen are thrilling. Smaller, modular nuclear reactors could make new miracles possible, like cars and planes that don’t need to be refueled or recharged. This is a world progressives, in particular, should want to hasten into existence. Clean, abundant energy is the foundation on which a more equal, just and humane world can be built. .............. “Folks will look back and be blown away by how we used energy today. They’ll say, ‘Wait, you just burned it?’” .



famously unfinished film These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence. ....... The project ended once Alejandro presented his massive compendium of artwork to the Hollywood studios. They turned it down out of fear or shortsightedness or simply because they could not comprehend what he was trying to do. ........ threatening that his “Dune” would be as long as 20 hours. .......... It will forever be the greatest film never made, because it exists solely in our imaginations. ......... This unfilmed film’s influence on our culture is nothing short of astounding. Specific ideas and images from the “Dune” art bible have escaped into the world. They can be experienced in movies such as “Blade Runner,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Prometheus,” “The Terminator” and even the original “Star Wars.” His “Dune” does not exist, yet it’s all around us. ........... It took Alejandro and his team two years of pure analog struggle to create his “Dune” — pencil on paper, paint on canvas, inventing the practical effects required to deliver his onscreen spectacle. ......... It’s different with A.I. No struggle was involved in creating these images of “Jodorowsky’s Tron.” It didn’t require any special skills .......... I want to say that influence is not the same thing as algorithm. But looking at these images, how can I be sure? .......... The technology is jaw-dropping. And it concerns me greatly. ............ Is the training of this A.I. model the greatest art heist in history? How much of art-making is theft, anyway? ....... If A.I.s were eligible for the Academy Awards, I’d vote for “Jodorowsky’s Tron” for best A.I. costume design just for dreaming up such outrageous retro sci-fi hats and helmets. ......... He needed to state his prompt cleanly and clearly. But the creativity bubbled out of the machine. ........ What will it mean when directors, concept artists and film students can see with their imaginations, when they can paint using all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization?



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Thursday, January 12, 2023

12: Russia

How India's ruling party is tightening its grip on Kashmir The BJP hopes the addition of up to a million mostly Hindu voters to the electoral roll, new electoral boundaries, seven more seats in the regional assembly and the reservation of nine for groups likely to back the BJP will give it a fighting chance of becoming the biggest party in the 90-seat legislature. ......... The 72-year-old, who is set to run for a third term in 2024, has combined promises of prosperity and social mobility with a robust Hindu-first agenda to dominate Indian politics. ........ "We have taken a pledge to cross 50-plus seats to form the next government with a thumping majority," the BJP's president for Jammu and Kashmir, Ravinder Raina, told Reuters. "The next chief minister will be from our party." ........ Jammu has about 5.3 million inhabitants, 62% of whom are Hindu while Kashmir Valley has 6.7 million, 97% of them Muslim ......... in 2019 when the BJP-led parliament in New Delhi revoked this status, which had denied rights to many Hindu communities not considered indigenous to the region........ "No one will ever understand how it feels when an educated child is told they should sweep the streets," she said......... "The BJP is not working to dilute the power of the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, but it is our duty to empower every citizen of India. In the case of Jammu and Kashmir, they just happen to be Hindus." ........... The party also launched a door-to-door campaign in 2020 involving hundreds of officials to identify those who would benefit from domicile certificates - and potentially vote for the BJP. ......... Marginalised groups such as Asha's "sweepers" and the West Pakistan Refugees group of Hindus who settled in Jammu and Kashmir after partition, are among those who will gain full citizenship for the first time. ...... The refugee community alone numbers more than 650,000. .

India, U.S. establish new trade group to bolster supply chains "Waiting for all-or-nothing comprehensive agreements will only slow our shared goal of achieving a $500 billion trade relationship," the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's U.S.-India Business Council, Atul Keshap, said in a statement......... Goyal also said the two countries are looking at larger bilateral footprints for trade and investments than mini deals, with a focus on greater market access and ease of doing business. ........ U.S. companies are also looking to invest more in India, he added. .

Russia posts a $47 billion budget deficit for 2022, its second highest in the post-Soviet era. The budget gap reached 3.3 trillion rubles, or 2.3 percent of the size of the Russian economy, according to the country’s finance minister. ........ “Despite the geopolitical situation, the restrictions and sanctions, we have fulfilled all our planned goals.” ....... the posted deficit for 2022 is second only in Russia’s post-Soviet history to the one reported for 2020, the year the coronavirus pandemic unfolded. ......... the Russian economy performed above expectations, buoyed by high commodity prices. ......... The government has financed the deficit by issuing bonds and using money from its rainy-day fund. .



With the battle for Soledar, the founder of a mercenary army seeks a bigger role in Russia’s power structure. . the head of Russia’s largest mercenary group, who had long denied ties to the military, has become in some ways the public face of Moscow’s war effort. ........... In recent months, Mr. Prigozhin has tried to position himself as the Kremlin’s indispensable military leader, even as he has stepped up his criticism of the Russian Defense Ministry. He has bolstered Russia’s decimated fighting ranks with tens of thousands of convicts recruited to his mercenary force, awarded medals, visited military cemeteries and, according to his frequent videos, appeared unexpectedly at the toughest sections of the front line. ........ This week, Mr. Prigozhin portrayed himself as the mastermind of what he presented as Russia’s biggest military success in months: a breakthrough in the eastern Ukrainian town of Soledar. ........ Mr. Prigozhin claimed that the city was fully under his control and took full credit for the apparent success. ........ “No other forces apart from PMC Wagner fighters have participated in the assault on Soledar,” Mr. Prigozhin said in an audio message published on the Telegram messaging app ............. Notably, Mr. Prigozhin’s claims were also contradicted by the Kremlin and the Russian military. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that its regular units were “fighting in the city,” and Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said that the capture of Soledar would be an important, but costly, tactical success, rather than a turning point. .......... there is a struggle for President Vladimir V. Putin’s favor as the military outlook in Ukraine darkens. .......... In late December, Wagner fighters released a profanity-laden video addressed to the military high command, in which they accused it of withholding ammunition and causing the deaths of their comrades. Mr. Prigozhin responded to the video by saying, “When you’re sitting in a warm office, the frontline problems are hard to hear,” in apparent reference to the generals. ............. And last week, a prominent Telegram news channel affiliated with Mr. Prigozhin, called Grey Zone, discredited the Defense Ministry’s claim that it had killed 600 Ukrainian servicemen in an aerial strike, by publishing photos of an intact building that was supposedly destroyed. ........... Mr. Prigozhin was seeking to replace Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, a longtime confidant of Mr. Putin’s, whom many Russian ultranationalists blame for Ukraine military disasters. ......... “I used to think of appointing Prigozhin as minister as craziness, but lately so much is happening in our country, that you can’t rule out anything.”

New York Has a YIMBY Governor Kathy Hochul’s modest housing plan practically counts as radical for America’s most exclusionary suburbs. .......... housing—“everyone’s largest expense.” ........ New York has created only a third as many homes as jobs over the past decade, Hochul said, can be blamed on “local land-use policies that are the most restrictive in the nation.” .......... New York has done virtually nothing to address its housing shortage over the past decade, even as California, Oregon, Washington, and Massachusetts—four other high-cost states—experiment with various ideas to override onerous local rules that restrict the supply of new homes. Not coincidentally, New York’s population has gone into decline. “People want to live here,” Hochul continued, “but local decisions to limit growth mean they cannot. Local governments can and should make different choices.” ........... “Her goal is to turn Brookhaven into the Bronx,” wrote State Assemblyman-elect Edward Flood, from Long Island, on Twitter. “Hard pass!” .........

when it comes to building places for people to live, New York City’s suburbs are the worst in the nation.

....... New York suburbs build less housing per capita than their peers around Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.—and it’s not particularly close. Nassau County, the Long Island proto-suburb where Levittown is located, is one of the slowest-growing suburbs in the country. ........ between 2010 and 2017, New York’s housing stock grew at a lower rate than Detroit’s. ....... The first big idea is to require all jurisdictions in the New York metro area to grow their housing stock by 3 percent every three years. It’s a goal so modest that Westchester and New York City are close to meeting it already, though it would prompt a more significant shift in the toniest small towns, as well as on Long Island. ............ The second obliges communities with Metropolitan Transportation Authority train stations to rezone for greater density within a half-mile of the stop. ........... The transit-oriented development rule targets the state’s underutilized commuter rail infrastructure, which has been the main focus of a decade of transit investments in New York City, at the expense of the subway. Nassau County has 53 commuter rail stations; Westchester 43. ......... His bill would ban minimum lot sizes over 1,200 square feet, abolish parking requirements, legalize fourplexes, and legalize six-unit buildings within a quarter-mile of a commuter rail or subway station. .......... if upzoning your own town is rarely a winning ticket, upzoning your neighbors might be a more attractive proposition.



AI’s Best Trick Yet Is Showering Us With Attention Face filters and selfie apps are so compelling because they simulate limitless interest in what we look like. ....... Digital tools can function like fun-house mirrors, feeding a wholly private fascination with ourselves. ....... but there was no denying a certain amount of freakish accuracy. I couldn’t stop looking. ....... One thing about inhabiting a face is that we can never quite see it the way others do. Mirrors give us a reversed image. Photographs freeze us in time at odd angles and, sometimes, in pitiless detail. Staring into a phone camera, preening to check our makeup or undereye circles, gives us a hyperreal mirror, but this, too, is distorted and reversed. Even video doesn’t quite capture us for ourselves, for the simple reason that we cannot watch ourselves objectively. ......... before photography, the only simple way to see a static image of yourself was through the brush or the pen or the chisel, necessarily filtered through another person’s creative intelligence. .......... Cameras have gradually made it unexceptional to see images of ourselves, but there is still something magical about having another person pay this kind of sustained creative attention to you. .......... the way the internet fuels self-obsession by pushing us to perform for others: On Facebook, people announce banal life developments and political opinions; on Instagram, we interrupt our fun to show others how much fun we’re having; on Twitter, we mine our personal lives for laughs. .........

The app tricks me into feeling seen, but really it is just me, trying once again to see myself.

.



RICHARD BRANSON SAYS ELON MUSK SHOWED UP AT HIS HOUSE AT 2AM "WE MADE A POT OF TEA AND SAT OUTSIDE UNDER THE STARS AND CAUGHT UP." . .

Mom Horrified by What Her Kids Are Seeing in Roblox This is seriously messed up. ........ Roblox has established itself as one of the biggest gaming outfits in the world — nevermind arguably the most successful metaverse out there — with well over 200 million estimated monthly users. In particular, it's become the de facto place to hang out online for a staggering number of children. ........ the popular app is allowing young children to enter some seriously questionable environments that should have parents concerned. ......... "I just spent six hours playing the games meant for five-year-olds and it was freaking awful," she wrote in an alarming Twitter thread, which has since gone viral. "Something is very wrong with Roblox Corp." ......... The massive online platform allows children of practically any age to play games that it lists as being suitable for "All Ages." The list of games under this age restriction used to be manually curated by the company, but Velociraptor suspects that situation "changed in the last few months," with Roblox seemingly opening the flood gates. ......... Some of the newly listed games listed as suitable for "All Ages," she said, include bizarre roleplaying games that involves a public bathroom simulator. ........ Worst of all, the Roblox users' avatars become partially undressed while doing their business inside a virtual bathroom stall, while other players watch. ......... A mere minute into playing the game, Velociraptor found that her avatar got stuck in a reclined position outside of the stall, resulting in an unsettling scene with other Roblox players repeatedly maneuvering as to suggesting a nonconsensual sexual act. ........ While Velociraptor said she expected "NSFW stuff" to occur when playing "any game with multiplayer," she was shocked that "these games are MANUALLY chosen by Roblox to earn the 'All Ages' tag." ....... Velociraptor also came across several games allowing users to stab popular children's TV show characters to death. ....... Futurism was able to easily confirm the existence of some of the games mentioned by Velociraptor , in addition to other equally horrifying games listed under "All Ages," including one called "Murder in the Public Bathroom Simulator." ......... "You can also literally cook/eat someone’s feet in one game," Velociraptor noted in a follow-up tweet. "I didn’t even get into all the other crazy stuff I found." ........ "A multiplayer platform of user-generated content marketed to young kids is a nightmare," Velociraptor noted. "There is literally no way to make it safe." ....... Previous reporting has uncovered similarly questionable activity on the platform. Last year, an investigation by the BBC found the company's metaverse was teeming with sex games dubbed "condos," allowing users' naked avatars to gather in large numbers. ......... it's a massive game of cat and mouse, except that the victims are impressionable children, not adults, who may know better. ......... "I deleted my kids’ Roblox accounts, and recommend you guys do, too." .

Experts Alarmed by Sex, Nazism in Children's Game Roblox

How Much Netflix Can the World Absorb? Bela Bajaria, who oversees the streaming giant’s hyper-aggressive approach to TV-making, says success is about “recognizing that people like having more.” .......... “Next time, I’ll get to stay for a week, so I won’t have to eat twenty-four tacos in twenty-four hours, like last time,” she said to the room of assembled staff members. ......... Bajaria told me that the ideal Netflix show is what one of her V.P.s, Jinny Howe, calls a “gourmet cheeseburger,” offering something “premium and commercial at the same time.” She praised the Latin American group for its recent track record of making slick telenovelas that draw large audiences outside Spanish-speaking regions. .......... A onetime winner of the Miss India Universe beauty pageant, Bajaria has glossy black hair that she often pulls into a high ponytail. Her voice, which she joked is classic “L.A. Valley Girl,” contributes to the impression that she’s younger than her fifty-two years. Although she is ceaselessly on the road for work, she says that she never experiences jet lag, a claim corroborated by her invariably peppy demeanor. “Is there anything you still think we need to do in terms of making a bigger bet, or a fresh swing?” she asked. .......... “We are taking the next step, because our competitors are going to be where we were five years ago.” ........ in Colombia, where Netflix was filming a big-budget miniseries adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” they were working to secure permission to transplant a rare chestnut tree onto the set. Another executive described “La Flor Más Bella,” a comedy that would feature a spirited morena girl navigating a high school full of “Whitexicans.” ......... Under her leadership, Netflix acts like a universal power converter, plugging in and adapting successful show formats to different parts of the world. Bajaria asked the Latin American staffers whether they were “working with the Middle East” to remake some of their more popular shows. .......... “It’s not a science. It’s a big creative endeavor. But it’s about recognizing that people like having more.” .........

When Netflix was founded, in 1997, its ambition, almost quaint in retrospect, was to overhaul the movie-rental business.

.......... Netflix began looking into making original programming in 2010, after HBO declined to enter a licensing deal. .......... the company’s goal was “to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” ......... Bajaria’s team more readily embraced the company’s new objective, the executive said: not only to compete with cable but to “replace all television.” .......... Netflix made the startling disclosure that it had lost subscribers for the first time in a decade; the day after the announcement, the company’s valuation plummeted by more than fifty billion dollars. .......... At a media conference in June, Bajaria said, “It’s a good place, to be the underdog.” ......... Its projected content budget for 2023 is the same as last year’s—seventeen billion dollars, a colossal sum, but, by the warped standards that the company set for itself, anything that isn’t rapid expansion looks like stagnation. .......... a head start in the large swaths of the globe that are still dominated by traditional “linear TV.” .......... in 2015. Two years later, Hastings acknowledged that “the big growth” for the company lay abroad. Netflix today offers streaming services in more than a hundred and ninety countries. ......... in the third quarter of 2022 alone it released more than a thousand episodes of original streaming television globally—at least five times the number of any other streaming service. Almost seventy per cent of Netflix’s two hundred and twenty-three million subscriptions now come from outside the U.S. and Canada. ......... she is the “most global television executive.” The London-born daughter of Indian parents from East Africa, Bajaria can juggle the relatively parochial workings of Hollywood and the more ambassadorial demands of representing Netflix abroad. ........ she impressed him, during a business trip to Delhi early in her tenure, by insisting that they leave the grounds of the five-star Imperial Hotel to eat at a “hole-in-the-wall that had epic food.” ........... “We truly believe that great storytelling can come from anywhere and be loved everywhere.” .......... In 2017, Shonda Rhimes left ABC, where she’d made runaway hits such as “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal,” and signed a contract with Netflix for a reported hundred million dollars. ........ relationship management is “half my job, if not more” .......... “There was a simpatico idea that things could be really good and commercial” ......... Bajaria’s parents, Rekha and Ramesh, met and married in Kenya but moved to the U.K. for her birth, in 1970, so that she would have what they considered a more desirable passport. ........ “Even later, when I was on the cover of Fortune, one of my Indian aunties was, like, ‘We’re proud of you, Bela, but it’s so surprising,’ ” Bajaria said. ........ (A print in her office, by the artist Maria Qamar, shows a bindi-adorned woman asking, “Has anyone seen my sharam?!”—the Hindi word for shame.) .......... After her victory, a Bollywood studio offered her an acting contract. She instead bought a copy of the Hollywood Creative Directory and sent a slew of cover letters to studios inquiring about entry-level jobs. She got two interviews. .......... “It was so rare to work for a woman, let alone a woman of color,” Bajaria said of Yee, who was born in Hong Kong. .......... Bajaria found her first major success, in 1999, with a Joan of Arc miniseries starring Leelee Sobieski, which was made on a tight schedule, over one winter, and was nominated for thirteen Emmys. ............. Many people who have worked with Bajaria described her uncommon decisiveness. Creative decision-making can be agonizing, especially when many millions of dollars are on the line. Bajaria does not overthink. .......... “The thing is, she’s not an intellectual. She’s smart. There’s a difference. She’s bold, and that’s what it takes. I don’t have that gene, and that’s why my career only went so far. You need to be able to say yes and keep forging ahead.” ......... “I knew she was immensely capable of volume. She also had this ingratiating way about her, where people were drawn to her.” ......... but Sarandos and Holland beat the studio out by buying two seasons up front, without a pilot—an extraordinary commitment at the time—for an astronomical hundred million dollars. ........... Pioneering the “binge” model, Netflix put out all eight episodes at once. ........... “I came up from a family of car washes, and Universal was my car wash, you know? I hired everybody there, I created the culture.” .......... Netflix is oriented around “saying yes in a town that’s built to say no.” In licensing, Bajaria occasionally followed this edict by saying yes to content that others within Netflix had already rejected. ......... “Insatiable” marked a “Walmart-ization” of Netflix as the platform increasingly prioritized voracious acquisition over curatorial discernment. .......... The series made the Top Ten list in ninety-two countries. In November, Netflix announced two additional seasons centered upon other serial killers. ........... What is quality? What is good versus not? That’s all subjective. I just want to super-serve the audience.” ........ The series was shot outside Berlin on a revolving virtual production stage that can generate photorealistic 3-D backdrops of locations anywhere. ........ four core demographic “quadrants”—male and female, under and over twenty-five. .......... the success of “Squid Game” across the world came as a complete surprise. ......... Most of the local-language originals that the platform produces are smaller programs that one analyst described as a “retention tool,” to keep viewers on Netflix after they’ve watched (or not watched) the latest splashy global show. In Japan, subscribers may be served “Narcos” but also dozens of anime series; in Scandinavia, “Ozark” but also plenty of Nordic noir. In India, there are original programs not only in Hindi and English but in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, and Bengali. ........ Outside of Europe and North America, the arpu—average revenue per user—tends to be lower. A subscription in India costs as little as a hundred and forty-nine rupees, or a dollar eighty-one. But it is relatively cheap to make shows abroad ........... Some of the most beloved TV shows were slow to catch on with audiences. “Seinfeld” was considered a failure in its first season. “The Wire” lagged in Season 2 before yielding twelve of the finest episodes of television ever made, in Season 3. ....... The Netflix algorithm insures that content “is served right up to you in front of your face, so it’s not like you can’t find it,” she told me. “At some point it’s, like, Is the budget better spent on a next new thing?” .......... “None of these individual shows are the product they are selling. They are just selling more Netflix.” .......... “As human beings we likely cry at the exact same things, but we all laugh at something totally different” .......... “There is no long tail without the big head.” ......... “People love to click on stories about us,” she said. “Netflix has great S.E.O.” ......... Rekha, her mother, cooks dinner for a couple of hundred people at a Hindu temple each week. .

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Tuesday, January 10, 2023

10: Hakeem



Election Deniers Are Also Economy Deniers The people who will be running the House of Representatives for the next two years — a group that does not, as far as anyone can tell, include Kevin McCarthy ........ Quite a few either subscribe to or are at least friendly to beliefs of the QAnon cult, which claims that the world is run by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles. ......... There wasn’t a recession in 2022. Indeed, the U.S. economy ended the year with continuing strong job growth and the unemployment rate all the way back down to what it was before Covid. ....... financial markets have basically declared the inflation threat over: They’re implicitly predicting roughly 2 percent inflation as far as the eye can see. ...... the federal government is, as an old line puts it, basically an insurance company with an army. ........ — federal dollars mainly go to retirement and health care programs on which scores of millions of Americans, including many Republicans, depend.

What Ukraine Teaches Us About Power modern wars don’t involve much hand-to-hand combat among guys with bulging muscles ........ strategic duels using long-range weapons, aided by a lot of technology. ......... “There were no decisive battles in World War II.” ........ Russia-Ukraine would turn into a war of attrition — and that Ukraine stood a good chance of winning such a war. ........ It’s true that on the Ukrainian side, Ukrainians are doing all the fighting and dying. But they haven’t had to rely on their own military-industrial base. ........ a form of soft power — Ukraine’s ability to portray itself as the defender of democracy against a brutal tyrant — the country has been getting lots of weapons from the West. ........ NATO’s military technology — notably the ability to make precision strikes on targets from incredible distances — appears to be even further ahead than most people realized ......... Russia began this war with a huge number of tanks and an immense amount of artillery. But many of the tanks were destroyed in the disastrous early attempt to seize Kyiv .......... productive capacity — ultimately, economic power — tends to be decisive in a war of attrition. And Russia is just hugely outclassed by that measure .......... the arithmetic, incredibly, seems to favor Ukraine.

Lula Has No Easy Choices Brazil is a major producer of steel as well as agricultural products such as citrus and soybeans. ......... Bolsonaro, although far right in his politics, governed as a free-spending populist. ....... There’s no second honeymoon for Lula. ......... Rising interest rates have increased the burden of debt. It isn’t just a problem for emerging markets, he wrote. “The over-indebtedness of the United States, Europe, Japan and China could create a much more severe debt crisis, both at sovereign and at corporate levels.” He predicted that 2023 will be “the year where we will start paying the cost of our inconsiderate addiction to debt.”

2023: the year when the cost of the global indebtedness will explode This year will be a tougher year for the global economy than 2022. For most of the world economy, this is going to be a tough year, tougher than the year we leave behind because the three big economies — US, EU, China — are all slowing down simultaneously. We expect one third of the world economy to be in recession Even countries that are not in recession, it would feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people. ......... inflation that spread around the world ......... Central banks, Governments and large corporations have a vested interest to hide the facts. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank is blaming the war in Ukraine for the inflation. Having warned in these columns and others about the risks of explosion of the world debt for the past five years, I remain flabbergasted to see that the narrative remains centered on recession and inflation. The impact of high interest rates increases of spreads and high value of the US dollar will start being felt where the over indebtedness has been exploding. .......... The continued increase of the US debt will have a budgetary impact in the years to come through the increase of the net interest costs that is fairly dramatic. In four years, the share of net interests to the budget deficit will move from 25 to 44%. It is basically unsustainable ...

The death of the Republican religion of fiscal conservatism started with the war in Irak.

........... those countries who are closest to a possible failure cannot be rescued any longer. ........ The dramatic stagnation of the Japanese economy will undoubtedly make the cost increase of its gigantic sovereign debt unbearable. ......... While China’s sovereign debt to GDP remains under control, at 80%, the effective leverage of the Chinese public sector reached proportions that represent 200% of the Chinese GDP. It is the speed at which the sovereign debt increased from 30% in ten years that makes China increasingly overleveraged. ........ 2023 is the year where we will start paying the cost of our inconsiderate addiction to debt. ........ We all make mistakes, and we all pay a price. But it will be deeply inequal making the coming years a huge social challenge.



I had a 37K YouTube audience, and here’s what I earned and learned Last week, I released a goodbye video on my YouTube channel. ....... I started the channel in 2019. Since then, I had published videos regularly once a week ....... It took me nine months to reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watched hours (subscribers came faster than watched hours.) ........ Reaching these milestones is required to monetize a channel. ........ When I became eligible for YouTube Partner Program, I enabled it which allowed me to earn a percentage from ads shown in my videos. ........ In my first nine months of video publishing, I made $0. Over the next five months, my earnings ranged from $30 to $35 a month. ........... I kept releasing videos. Once a week, sometimes twice. They were 10–15 minutes long (it was all before Shorts) ....... In the next nine months, the channel grew rapidly (sort of) and by 2020 had 10K subscribers and a gross income of $900 (for 2019–2020). ....... On average, I would spend six hours making a video ........ my income from the channel wasn’t enough to cover the cost of a DSLR camera. ....... most of my viewers watched my videos on mobile devices. For that kind of video viewing, iPhone’s filming quality was fine ........ Whether I released one video a week or two, or uploaded Shorts or not (when those were introduced on the platform), it had no impact on the channel’s growth. ............. My videos have gone viral only twice. Once by accident (I recorded a spontaneous video about Canada, low quality, but Youtube picked it up and now it has over 283.4K views), another time by calculation (I made a video about the pros and cons of living in Canada after researching trends and demands, and YouTube algorithms "endorsed" it, so now the video has over 389.4K views.) ....... I switched to prioritizing content that could potentially gain more views — Canada, travel, and lifestyle. ........ Over 2021, the channel grew by another 15K, and now it has 37,000 subscribers and 2.5 million views (September 2022.) ........ when I sat down and soberly calculated the losses vs income, it became evident that I should stop dedicating myself to the channel. ......... Publishing a video usually took me about six hours, and sometimes more. In total, I produced 240 videos (excluding shorts). That is, in the most conservative calculations, the channel took 1440 of my productive hours. ....... The time spent on shorts, live streams, and replies to comments brings the figure to at least 2000 hours. All that effort and time to get hundreds of “thank you” (which is nice) and this amount of $ (which is sad): ........ Bloggers receive 45% of YouTube’s ad revenue, while Youtube takes 55%. ........ My advertising revenue from Youtube over the past three years has been $5K. ........ Youtube bloggers often say that their main income comes from paid integrations, brand partnerships, and product sales, not YouTube ads. And it’s true. ............ I enabled the Membership feature and had one $5 sponsor. Due to some reason, Youtube was taking 80% of the sponsor’s paid membership, and I was getting $1/month: ......... A simple math calculation revealed that an hour of my work was only worth $1.5. I let my work and time get devalued drastically. In terms of profitability, freelancing was 48x more lucrative for me. ......... You will need to release videos regularly if you don’t want to go into YT oblivion. .......... The more subscribers you have, the more hatred you get. I had a Russian-speaking audience, I hate to admit it, but they can be extremely spiteful. The profanity and animosity of their attacks are enough to break the spirit of any highly motivated individual. While English-speaking audiences are generally kinder, still be prepared for some harsh remarks.



This Year, Try Organizing Your Life Like a Monk The lives of monks and nuns have taught me, a non-Catholic mother who sleeps late whenever possible and binges Netflix, how to better live. Because of their example, I’ve adopted a rule of life. A rule of life is an overarching plan governing your daily practices, habits and routines. It is not a resolution, but rather a comprehensive way to take stock of how you spend your time so that you can be the person you want to be. ........... The most famous rule of life is the Rule of St. Benedict, written in the sixth century, which organizes the life of Benedictine monks, specifying everything from what they should wear to when they should pray. My copy of the Rule of St. Benedict clocks in at just under 100 pages. My personal rule of life, by contrast, is three pages long (and ever evolving). .......... His rule prohibits monks from having private ownership and wealth. ...... His rule recommends times of fasting. ........ in one of Jesus’ most famous teachings, in John 15, he says, “Abide in the vine and you will bear much fruit.” His disciples are like the branches, and God is like the vine. By living in God, we bear what he called fruit, which is this metaphor for what is later qualified in the New Testament as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. ..........

Western culture is fracturing at the seams with spikes in anxiety, depression and mental illness, loneliness and alienation, the breakdown of the family and systemic racism.

.......... every morning, I get up at such a time that I can spend an hour in prayer, followed by an hour of reading before I let myself look at my phone. ........ At a more family level, we practice Sabbath together. The whole 24-hour period, we put all of our phones away. We gather around the table with close friends. We celebrate a huge meal. We practice gratitude, rest. We sleep. We play. .......... The monastic tradition has preserved something down through the centuries that was originally for all Christians. .......... Communities have to form around something. In the American context, many communities attempt to form around preferences and pleasure. That’s not bad, but that tends not to create a deep, vulnerable level of relationship. In most American contexts, the moment that the relationship is no longer pleasing, we slip away. ......... But ancient Christian communities were really trying to go the distance with each other. Part of the goal of a disciple of Jesus is to be formed into a person of love, and formation tends to happen in these interpersonal relationships over a long period of time. You have to stay in difficult relationships to actually be forged into that kind of person. ........... all people have a rule of life. You likely have a morning routine. You have a way that you spend your free time. You probably have a job. Hopefully you have a budget. ........ it is working, but it’s poorly designed. It’s giving them outcomes — emotional outcomes, relational outcomes, vocational outcomes — different than the ones they actually desire ............. the way that we’re all addicted to our phones and waste copious amounts of time scrolling on Instagram or reading click bait-y news to scare us .......... But that micro habit is forming us into a kind of person that is not likely the kind of person we want to be. ........ Start really, really, really small. Don’t start with massive steps. ........ If it’s “I’m going to work out an hour a day,” start with “I’m going to do 10 push-ups a day.” ........ Do it with other people. A rule of life — from a Christian perspective — is always done with other people. You can personalize a rule, but it’s an attempt to live with other people into a shared vision of human flourishing. Without that, it’s not really a rule of life. ..........

you can’t live by a rule of life and live at the hurried pace of a modern American person, most of whom are radically overbusy, distracted, overcommitted, underslept and exhausted all the time.

........ A rule of life will force you to face your mortality, your limitations, your emotional limitations, and it will force you to say no. The joy is that on the other side of it is a life where you are integrated. You are living at a pace that you can walk until you die and still be deeply joyful and year over year become more loving and kind and peaceful. But there is no way to do that without a willingness to live unlike how most people around you are living.



Pope Benedict Wasn’t Conservative. He Was Something Much More Surprising. Whereas John Paul’s sunny disposition and glad-handing stadium tours eventually won him the affection of nearly everyone not named Sinead O’Connor, Cardinal Ratzinger was seen by critics (and even some admirers) as a holdover from the period before the Second Vatican Council. His was an older, more aloof style of churchmanship that seemed ultraconservative, detached, forbidding, skeptical of emotion, indifferent to the experience of the laity and the lower clergy alike, much less to those of non-Catholics. His enemies called him “God’s Rottweiler.” .......... Benedict the theologian bears almost no resemblance to popular caricatures. ....... has more in common with that of Soren Kierkegaard or John Henry Newman or G.K. Chesterton — those idiosyncratic but somehow essential figures in the modern history of Western Christianity who, in translating fundamental questions about the nature of the universe into the language of their own era, spoke for all time. ............. one of the 100,000 or so Catholics in this country who attend the old Mass each week ......... In the past, church councils had issued long series of condemned propositions that the Catholic faithful must abjure under penalty of excommunication; the style of these announcements was technical and precise, leaving no room for ambiguity about what must be believed. By contrast the documents of Vatican II contain little — indeed, arguably no — dogmatic material, and in place of the precise terminology derived from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas they substitute phenomenological jargon typical of midcentury continental philosophy. ............ his claim that “the real heart of faith in resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of bodies, to which we have reduced it in our thinking,” which seems to cast doubt on the idea that the resurrection of the dead at the end of time will be a literal, corporeal phenomenon. ......... For conservative Catholics of my generation, the existence of hell as a place of eternal torment is about as controversial as the existence of gravity. ............ the future pope describes hell as “real, total loneliness and dreadfulness,” a willed state beyond the reach of love, a definition he arrives at by way of Hermann Hesse. In “Eschatology,” he writes, “No quibbling helps here,” before admitting that hell “has a firm place in the teachings of Jesus.” Not exactly fire and brimstone. ........... For Father Ratzinger, writing in 1958, the church on the eve of the Second Vatican Council was a “church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians,” a church exhausted by empty formalism. ......... fundamental questions faced by our species — not only whether God exists but why matter does; the possibility of a coherent account of the good in ethics and politics; the role of reason in public life .......... “the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practiced.” For Benedict the “struggling and questioning” of agnostics was an admirable posture, a radical openness that ought to motivate believers “to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible.” ........... a slim volume of talks given by Cardinal Ratzinger on the Book of Genesis in the 1980s. ........ a being who does not merely love but who is love itself.



At Columbia’s $600 Million Business School, Time to Rethink Capitalism On the developing Manhattanville campus, the architecture of Diller Scofidio + Renfro reinforces a social movement in business education to do good as well as make money. ........ Their design reflects the close fit of the architecture to person-to-person connection and intensified interaction — what the school’s leadership sees as essential to the sprawling aspirations it has for its graduates to do good as they make money. .......... The design of the complex just blocks north of Columbia’s main Morningside Heights campus coincided with business schools around the country coming to terms with a rising chorus of criticism that companies are too predatory, exploitative and monopolistic, and that business education had to change. ......... “it is hard to teach narrow, applied skills and also encourage students to wrestle with giant, ambiguous questions about ultimate values and hierarchies of power.” ........... the twisty stairways come in. They open onto informal lounges and numerous six-person study rooms at the landings, all walled in glass, that are popular even when the adjacent classrooms are empty. (All spaces are completely accessible to people with mobility impairments.) ........... “They are about problem-solving and being in the world.” ......... They also constantly encounter the city thanks to the stairs, which kaleidoscopically unveil views of the campus, a tangle of nearby viaducts, as well as brick tenements and public housing towers — in the process reminding people of the messy world beyond. .......... The centers run programs on managing nonprofits, addressing climate change, and improving employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated people. .......... an “urban layer,” the idea that all the new buildings would float above tall glass-clad street frontages that were largely committed to facilities open to the public. ......... Skeptics will be watching the pivot of Columbia and other top business schools, like the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, to more high-minded teaching methods. It may be all too easy to default to the comfort of traditional quantitative modeling and case-study what-ifs. After all, schools are also buffeted by those who continue to worship the ideology of unfettered markets, and loudly proclaim social and environmentally focused teachings to be excessively “woke.” ........... “How do I find personal and professional financial stability and not sell my soul?” ........ wonders if climate change and “authoritarianism 2.0,” are among challenges that businesses can no longer ignore

This Is Not Your Grandfather’s M.B.A. more than the generic American vocation to make money and live your best life now ....... tentative questions about the means and ends of capitalism itself. ........ Even before the pandemic, business schools were offering initiatives and program concentrations with names like “Conscientious Capitalism” and “Sustainable Business,” in line with investors’ growing interest in “environmental, social and governance” considerations, better known as E.S.G. ......... Are they a kind of divinity school for secular capitalists, where students discern their true vocation? Today’s business schools try to fulfill all these aims at once — but it is hard to teach narrow, applied skills and also encourage students to wrestle with giant, ambiguous questions about ultimate values and hierarchies of power. ......... The goal of the Tuck School of Business, founded in 1900 at Dartmouth College, was to educate “the man first and the businessman afterwards.” At the dedication of Harvard Business School’s new campus in 1927, one speaker declared “that the ministers of our business, like the ministers of our churches, should appreciate their responsibility.” He stressed the need for businessmen to have a wide-ranging education, to become “men who have not only a broad outlook in history, politics, and economics — but men who have also that moral and religious training which tends to develop character.” ........... this ideal of “the C.E.O. as enlightened corporate statesman” ......... schools are adept at defanging detractors, cordoning them off in their own professional journals and conferences and keeping them on payroll. ........ It’s liberal fairy dust. Others don’t see it that way. They think capitalism just needs to become quite a bit nicer, that we need to orient corporations toward more benign investment strategies and less toxic relations with workers. That would be good — I’m not against small steps — but that diagnosis doesn’t reflect the nature of the problem we have.” .......... The Ford report — and a similar one sponsored the same year by the Carnegie Corporation — warned against ignoring the humanities or allowing faculty members and students to specialize too narrowly. Yet the funding that followed pushed schools in the opposite direction, consistent with the 1960s vogue for number-crunching wonkishness. Business schools embraced the hyper-specialization that pervades the rest of academia, falling especially under the thrall of economics and other heavily quantitative disciplines. ......... Business schools now pump “out over half a million narrow specialists per year” into an economic culture that prizes quick returns and efficiency .......... He lamented the absence of the humanities, qualitative disciplines that “teach someone how to think in a complex adaptive system. We treat that system like something else — we silo-ize it, break it into chunks, put it back together and think it will be fine. The humanities are the only hope for thinking about things in holistic, non-quantifiable ways.” .......... At a time when society needs managers who can grapple with uncertainty and operate in a culture divided over basic questions of justice and human flourishing, most business schools still emphasize specialized skills and quantitative methods, the seductive simplicity of economic and social scientific models. They often reduce the weirdness of human organizations to the tidy pedagogy of the case method, in which students discuss 15- to 20-page accounts of how an individual or a corporation handled some task or crisis. ............

“The case method is theater”

......... The case method does not dominate every business school, but Harvard Business School, where the method originated, sold more than 15 million cases to other schools and organizations in 2020. Mr. Martin estimated that 30 percent of North American business education is “aided and abetted by an H.B.S. case.” ......... sees “environmental, social and governance” not as politically fashionable hand-waving, but a call to center the M.B.A. on big, hard questions.

Think Screens Stole Our Attention? Medieval Monks Were Distracted Too. In “The Wandering Mind,” the historian Jamie Kreiner shows that the struggle to focus is not just a digital-age blight but afflicted even those who spent their lives in seclusion and prayer. .......... the ruins of our attention have commanded a lot of attention. We can’t focus anymore. ....... Getting any “deep work” done requires formidable willpower or a broken modem. Reading has degenerated into skimming and scrolling. The only real way out is to adopt a meditation practice and cultivate a monkish existence. .......... the monks of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (around A.D. 300 to 900) struggled mightily with attention. Connecting one’s mind to God was no easy task. ......... For the monk seeking oneness with God, the body was an encumbrance. After all, Kreiner notes, “angels were pure consciousness.” As the sixth-century desert father Dorotheos said of his body, “It is killing me, I am killing it.” ......... Elites who converted to monasticism had to be reminded of the need to dress shabbily and forgo the cologne, but “unkemptness could become its own distraction,” Kreiner says, with a monk “feeling vain about his griminess.” Virtually the only point of agreement among the monks in Kreiner’s book was a profound suspicion (at least officially) of sex and sleep. ......... Monks were encouraged to read slowly and methodically, and they engaged with the text by writing notes in the margin. Kreiner says this marginalia helped them “to stay alert” — though she also concedes that sometimes what they scribbled down had nothing to do with the text at hand. An image from a copy of Priscian’s Latin grammar includes a note in Old Irish that reads lathaerit, or “massive hangover.” ........... Even prayer, which was supposed to be “the ideal state of attentiveness,” wasn’t enough to crowd out other thoughts. A monk might achieve the sublime stillness of revelation, but this was only temporary, and in the next moment the mind would revert to its old distractible ways. .......... Monks were determined not only to discipline the mind but also to work with it, accommodating some of its foibles and idiosyncrasies, because they saw concentration “as a matter of eternal life and death.”



The Mediterranean Diet Really Is That Good for You. Here’s Why. It has become the bedrock of virtuous eating. Experts answer common questions about how it leads to better health....... Those who lived in and around the Mediterranean — in countries like Italy, Greece and Croatia — had lower rates of cardiovascular disease than participants who lived elsewhere. Their diets, rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, lean proteins and healthy fats, seemed to have a protective effect. ......... It’s something that was developed over time, by millions of people, because it actually tastes good. And it just happens to be healthy.” ....... People who follow the Mediterranean diet tend to “eat foods their grandparents would recognize,” Dr. Heffron added: whole, unprocessed foods with few or no additives. ......... The diet prioritizes whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, herbs, spices and olive oil. Fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids, like salmon, sardines and tuna, are the preferred animal protein source. Other lean animal proteins, like chicken or turkey, are eaten to a lesser extent. And foods high in saturated fats, like red meat and butter, are eaten rarely. Eggs and dairy products like yogurt and cheese can also be part of the Mediterranean diet, but in moderation. ............ those who followed the Mediterranean diet most closely for up to 12 years had about a 25 percent reduced risk of developing cardiovascular disease. This was mainly because of changes in blood sugar, inflammation and body mass index ........ It’s important that people also pay attention to other tenets of good heart health, like getting regular exercise and adequate sleep and not smoking. ............. olive oil and nuts, which are heart-healthy yet high in calories and can lead to weight gain if consumed in large portions. .......... Good sources of iron include nuts, tofu, legumes and dark leafy green vegetables like spinach and broccoli. Foods rich in vitamin C, like citrus, bell peppers, strawberries and tomatoes, can also help your body absorb iron.

100 Notable Books of 2022

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