No I think the worst thing so far was adding instant-messaging to an office communication system that already included instant email. Now nobody can remember where communication happened or where they stashed the document. Was it in an email? Teams? Sharepoint? Or a centralized drive? God help us it's a mess.
That discussion I was having with that person - was that in a chat just between us two? or with another person? or that other chat group those two people are in but has several others in it too? Or in the chat of that meeting we had about it? Or is it part of a Teams post? Which teams post in which Teams group that we all belong to was that in??
OMG, link no2: comparing Sam Altman’s explanation of note-taking “on PAPER” with lan McKellen explaining acting on Extras … this is why we love The Bluestocking!
At the apex of Ta-Nahesi Coates’s cultural power, as Ms Lewis will most likely remember, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic actually granted Mr Coates a veto on new editorial hires as a condition of his own employment. Coates went on to veto the hiring of Kevin D. Williamson, the author recently of “Big White Ghetto,” a collection of his peripatetic essays which I found enormously entertaining and insightful. (To get a taste of Mr. Williamson’s style and POV, his piece about the J.D. Vance/cats for dinner hullabaloo has been brought out from behind the paywall at The Dispatch.) Unfortunately for The Atlantic, the hire had already been made and his cancellation cost the magazine plenty in severance. Coates left soon after to write comic books, which strikes me as apropos.
I’ve read several of Mr. Coates’s essays and aside from the Po-Mo gloss of academic jargon (the usual: Derrida, Foucault, Fanon(!)) his theme was almost always the oppress/oppressor reductionism that makes most writing about Israel/Gaza so depressingly Manichean, an opinion I share with Ms Lewis.
The essay and its publication in New York Magazine reminds me of the scenes in the movie American Fiction, the scenes where the Author discusses his book with The Editors. If you’ve seen the movie - and it’s worth your time - you’ll know what I’m referring to. Baffling it isn’t.
Thank you for introducing me to the word "Manichean." It is so much more compact than "black and white." Sadly, humans seem drawn to this worldview, and it is thoroughly perpetuated in pop culture.
It sort of sounds like he does have an interesting process that he doesn't quite get to in the video.
He talks about tearing the pages out and throwing them on the floor. He seems to be doing some kind of processing with all those notes, which might be kind of interesting.
I'd like to know what happens before he crumples the notes up and throws the paper away.
I think a lot of us (me) take a lot of notes but just sort of leave them there, hoping the very act does something for us. And it probably does! But it sounds like Altman takes another step.
Which might be compelling!
But they don't really unpack that bit.
Instead they get into the particular pen he uses and his opinions about cheap spiral notebooks. Not that great. But I think maybe we missed the good bit.
It seems so many views on the subject are driven by false equivalence to a defining part of folk memory/cultural history. ‘Well of course the Irish are pro-Palestine, it stands to reason’/‘this is just like slavery and colonialism because it’s all I’m interested in’/‘this persecution of Israel like Germany 1938.’ Case A is not always Case B just because it matters to you.
Intrigued by the debunking of blue zones though I feel they could have come up with a more creative title lol “Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud”
I'm no life coach so I won't comment on personal optimisation, other than to say cake probably isn't optimal but I'm not about to give it up. I have written a lot about the organisational side of things though. I argue that there is a direct trade off between an organisation being perfectly optimised being agile - able to respond to new trends and changing environments. The full argument is about 1/3 of a book (Future-proof Your Business for those interested) but the short version is that the better you get at operating the way things are today, the harder it is to change to a different way of working when the world changes around you. Obviously there's a happy medium and I suspect that's true for people too.
I don’t really know what to say about your comments on the Israeli Gaza war. I appreciate that you are calling into question the claims made by the author of a clearly biased article but your own comments about the war betray a bias that I was not expecting. You mention some key buzzwords “avoidable casualties”, “ceasefire” and “war crimes” as well as describing your experience of Israel as a “two tier society” because Palestinians (you don’t say whether from Gaza or the West Bank) were subject to “boarder checks” which prevented them from being reliable members of a theatre production. These comments clearly reflect your own ignorance about the “complexity” of the situation. As a journalist I would have thought that to comment in such a blasé way about a situation that by your own admission is so complex would be not OK? And to feed into all the anti Israel bias using those terms that are exclusively applied ONLY to Israel in this war? Israel has nearly 2 million Muslims living within its boarders (not Gaza or the West Bank) happily enjoying full rights as Israeli citizens. The checks you are talking about apply to Gazans and people from the West Bank because Hamas and other terrorist organisations have been regularly sending terrorists to Israel to commit actual acts of terror such as blowing themselves up in public spaces filled with civilians. So, you know, they kind of have to now check that they are not letting terrorists in? Seems reasonable to me if you know just a fraction of the history of the situation. October 7th was literally a full blown war crime. Videoed for all to see but yet none of the lefty feminists wanted to say anything about that, you know, loads of violence against females stuff, because, you know #metoounlessurajew. Israel are fighting for their very existence. Have some compassion for the Israelis and the Jewish people.
Thank you for doing that and you did indeed stand out as one of the feminists who even acknowledged the atrocity. I follow you partly for your writings on feminism and the gender debates and I didn’t mean for my comment to say that you hadn’t spoken up, but I see now that it might look that way. So I apologise for that. I do however stand by my observations on your stance towards Israel now, after the realities of war. Because Israel is at war. Fighting a legal war on several different fronts. If you attack a country they are legally entitled to retaliate and declare war. What is not reported in the UK press is that Israel has continued to be under attack since October 7th. With tens of thousands of Israelis displaced and only the iron dome defence system to protect from a continuous barrage of missiles from all sides. You try living under that reality! The nova festival goers were not initially alarmed by the missiles as this was a COMMON PLACE experience for them living near the boarder. They thought it was just another missile attack. Who lives like that? Not me and not you. Judge Israel when you have walked in her shoes.
Enjoyed this issue a lot. I'm almost on the early foothills of the pathway to forgiving you for recommending the diabolical book I'm reading now. I won't name it for fear of giving it more publicity than it deserves but I am deeply hurt to recall that you compared it to the writing of Douglas Adams.
Being a one step at a time kind of a guy it's the first one in the series (of 2) that I'm reading now. I promised myself I would dump it when Kindle told me I was at 25%. So now I'm at 26% and the story just seems to be taking off . . . I could write a lot more here but I'll save it for Goodreads. Just as the Tao of Pooh served mainly to remind me what a genius was AA Milne so this experience is reminding me of Adams but absolutely not in any way that I can deduce from either the story or the style. Sorry to Helen Lewis. I much prefer reading and listening to what you have to say!
Thank you so much for the weekly email, as ever. I was intrigued by the debunking of blue zones so found this interview with the researcher - interesting and funny + great last line 👍🏻 https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023
No I think the worst thing so far was adding instant-messaging to an office communication system that already included instant email. Now nobody can remember where communication happened or where they stashed the document. Was it in an email? Teams? Sharepoint? Or a centralized drive? God help us it's a mess.
Absolutely. It’s the bane of my life.
That discussion I was having with that person - was that in a chat just between us two? or with another person? or that other chat group those two people are in but has several others in it too? Or in the chat of that meeting we had about it? Or is it part of a Teams post? Which teams post in which Teams group that we all belong to was that in??
With email I had a filing system!
I had a boss who would reply to emails on teams (or vice versa) to frustrate the paper trail that would have shown how fecking incompetent he was.
OMG, link no2: comparing Sam Altman’s explanation of note-taking “on PAPER” with lan McKellen explaining acting on Extras … this is why we love The Bluestocking!
At the apex of Ta-Nahesi Coates’s cultural power, as Ms Lewis will most likely remember, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic actually granted Mr Coates a veto on new editorial hires as a condition of his own employment. Coates went on to veto the hiring of Kevin D. Williamson, the author recently of “Big White Ghetto,” a collection of his peripatetic essays which I found enormously entertaining and insightful. (To get a taste of Mr. Williamson’s style and POV, his piece about the J.D. Vance/cats for dinner hullabaloo has been brought out from behind the paywall at The Dispatch.) Unfortunately for The Atlantic, the hire had already been made and his cancellation cost the magazine plenty in severance. Coates left soon after to write comic books, which strikes me as apropos.
I’ve read several of Mr. Coates’s essays and aside from the Po-Mo gloss of academic jargon (the usual: Derrida, Foucault, Fanon(!)) his theme was almost always the oppress/oppressor reductionism that makes most writing about Israel/Gaza so depressingly Manichean, an opinion I share with Ms Lewis.
The essay and its publication in New York Magazine reminds me of the scenes in the movie American Fiction, the scenes where the Author discusses his book with The Editors. If you’ve seen the movie - and it’s worth your time - you’ll know what I’m referring to. Baffling it isn’t.
Thank you for introducing me to the word "Manichean." It is so much more compact than "black and white." Sadly, humans seem drawn to this worldview, and it is thoroughly perpetuated in pop culture.
OK on the Sam Altman notetaking.
It sort of sounds like he does have an interesting process that he doesn't quite get to in the video.
He talks about tearing the pages out and throwing them on the floor. He seems to be doing some kind of processing with all those notes, which might be kind of interesting.
I'd like to know what happens before he crumples the notes up and throws the paper away.
I think a lot of us (me) take a lot of notes but just sort of leave them there, hoping the very act does something for us. And it probably does! But it sounds like Altman takes another step.
Which might be compelling!
But they don't really unpack that bit.
Instead they get into the particular pen he uses and his opinions about cheap spiral notebooks. Not that great. But I think maybe we missed the good bit.
Yes but... Milly Dowler?
It seems so many views on the subject are driven by false equivalence to a defining part of folk memory/cultural history. ‘Well of course the Irish are pro-Palestine, it stands to reason’/‘this is just like slavery and colonialism because it’s all I’m interested in’/‘this persecution of Israel like Germany 1938.’ Case A is not always Case B just because it matters to you.
Intrigued by the debunking of blue zones though I feel they could have come up with a more creative title lol “Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud”
"Our argument is that Britain’s problems are very simple"...
So reductivism is still on-trend, then – at least in thought-leader world.
I'm no life coach so I won't comment on personal optimisation, other than to say cake probably isn't optimal but I'm not about to give it up. I have written a lot about the organisational side of things though. I argue that there is a direct trade off between an organisation being perfectly optimised being agile - able to respond to new trends and changing environments. The full argument is about 1/3 of a book (Future-proof Your Business for those interested) but the short version is that the better you get at operating the way things are today, the harder it is to change to a different way of working when the world changes around you. Obviously there's a happy medium and I suspect that's true for people too.
I don’t really know what to say about your comments on the Israeli Gaza war. I appreciate that you are calling into question the claims made by the author of a clearly biased article but your own comments about the war betray a bias that I was not expecting. You mention some key buzzwords “avoidable casualties”, “ceasefire” and “war crimes” as well as describing your experience of Israel as a “two tier society” because Palestinians (you don’t say whether from Gaza or the West Bank) were subject to “boarder checks” which prevented them from being reliable members of a theatre production. These comments clearly reflect your own ignorance about the “complexity” of the situation. As a journalist I would have thought that to comment in such a blasé way about a situation that by your own admission is so complex would be not OK? And to feed into all the anti Israel bias using those terms that are exclusively applied ONLY to Israel in this war? Israel has nearly 2 million Muslims living within its boarders (not Gaza or the West Bank) happily enjoying full rights as Israeli citizens. The checks you are talking about apply to Gazans and people from the West Bank because Hamas and other terrorist organisations have been regularly sending terrorists to Israel to commit actual acts of terror such as blowing themselves up in public spaces filled with civilians. So, you know, they kind of have to now check that they are not letting terrorists in? Seems reasonable to me if you know just a fraction of the history of the situation. October 7th was literally a full blown war crime. Videoed for all to see but yet none of the lefty feminists wanted to say anything about that, you know, loads of violence against females stuff, because, you know #metoounlessurajew. Israel are fighting for their very existence. Have some compassion for the Israelis and the Jewish people.
I immediately wrote a piece after October 7 condemning it.
Thank you for doing that and you did indeed stand out as one of the feminists who even acknowledged the atrocity. I follow you partly for your writings on feminism and the gender debates and I didn’t mean for my comment to say that you hadn’t spoken up, but I see now that it might look that way. So I apologise for that. I do however stand by my observations on your stance towards Israel now, after the realities of war. Because Israel is at war. Fighting a legal war on several different fronts. If you attack a country they are legally entitled to retaliate and declare war. What is not reported in the UK press is that Israel has continued to be under attack since October 7th. With tens of thousands of Israelis displaced and only the iron dome defence system to protect from a continuous barrage of missiles from all sides. You try living under that reality! The nova festival goers were not initially alarmed by the missiles as this was a COMMON PLACE experience for them living near the boarder. They thought it was just another missile attack. Who lives like that? Not me and not you. Judge Israel when you have walked in her shoes.
Enjoyed this issue a lot. I'm almost on the early foothills of the pathway to forgiving you for recommending the diabolical book I'm reading now. I won't name it for fear of giving it more publicity than it deserves but I am deeply hurt to recall that you compared it to the writing of Douglas Adams.
lol I have that one next to my bed and suggested it to my book club. Am I going to get ousted over it?
Being a one step at a time kind of a guy it's the first one in the series (of 2) that I'm reading now. I promised myself I would dump it when Kindle told me I was at 25%. So now I'm at 26% and the story just seems to be taking off . . . I could write a lot more here but I'll save it for Goodreads. Just as the Tao of Pooh served mainly to remind me what a genius was AA Milne so this experience is reminding me of Adams but absolutely not in any way that I can deduce from either the story or the style. Sorry to Helen Lewis. I much prefer reading and listening to what you have to say!