What do you mean [Cuts from the movies]

What do you mean, what do you mean?

An interview with THE MAN [Article]

Put this aside for the weekend if you have to, but read it now if you can. Especially if you are an employee.

 I run a solid business, and I don’t think I’m going to run out of employees or customers any time soon, so I’ll spare you the company-spokesman runaround — no, I don’t take responsibility for the state of their lives and I don’t see why I should. Particularly when they don’t take much responsibility for their lives themselves.

This might be fiction, but it might not. Consider it, & make up your mind.

I forgot my phone [Video]

Poignant. Our connected devices are making us more disconnected. I forgot my phone.

Lenny Kravitz Overhears High School Kids Playing His Music and Surprises Them by Joining In [Video]

"One day Lenny Kravitz was sitting with some friends on a terrace in New Orleans when he heard a familiar sound. A group of high school students from a baptist church in Texas was performing Kravitz’s hit “Fly Away” on the steps across Decatur Street from Jackson Square in the French Quarter.

Kravitz decided he wanted to join in. One of his friends went down and asked the group’s director if that would be alright. He said yes, it would. So when the famous musician arrived, the group started playing the song again from the top. "

Our shared condition - consciousness: A talk by John Searle [Video]

Philosopher John Searle lays out the case for studying human consciousness -- and systematically shoots down some of the common objections to taking it seriously. As we learn more about the brain processes that cause awareness, accepting that consciousness is a biological phenomenon is an important first step. And no, he says, consciousness is not a massive computer simulation. Worth a listen.

How to make perfect coffee [Article]

The coffee-holic in me was drawn to this article like a moth to a flame - and with possibly the same result :)  These guys explain the art of coffee making, & the chemistry involved with panache. 

How musicians treat drummers sometimes [Video]

Another instrument, I guess.

Twitter's conscience-in-residence moves on [Article]

Alex Macgillvray, the key figure responsible for Twitter's aggressively pro-free speech position, has announced he is to leave the company. May be of interest to some.

Climate Name Change - the Video

This petition to name storms after climate change deniers, has a great video making their point. Top creative points.

Since 1954, the World Meteorological Organization has been naming extreme storms after people. As scientific evidence shows that climate change is creating increasingly frequent and devastating storms, and with climate scientists declaring these extreme weather events as the new normal, we propose a new naming system. A system that names extreme storms caused by climate change, after the policy makers who deny climate change and obstruct climate policy.

The free coffee test, or Lefkowitz’s Law of Corporate Financial Health HT @DMarti

Why is it that removing small perks for employees like free soda tends to lead to an exodus of talent? After all, a can of soda costs what, fifty cents? Maybe a dollar? And yet when management decides to stop bearing that small expense, people have a habit of packing up and leaving, which seems like a big move to make over the price of a can of soda. Jason LEfkowitz has a theory

The financial health of a company can be inferred from the quality, variety and cost to the employee of the snacks and beverages it offers its employees.

How Technology is destroying jobs [article]

MIT Sloan School of Management's Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfree predict that impressive advances in technology have ominous consequences for jobs:

 They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries.

Stephen Cave: Anti-death behaviour [Interview]

Philosopher Stephen Cave in conversation with Susie Neilson:

Thinking less about yourself, more about other people and other causes, so your own death doesn’t seem as important to you, because these other causes and people will live on. Those other things will help you come to terms with death.

Read more

My dear son: [Letters of note]

A letter from novelist & screenwriter John D Swain to his son as he leaves home to Yale University.

I think I had never realized before that I was getting old. 

Charlie Stross on Syria [Article]

Sane voices are rather hard to find when everyone wants vengeance - whether warranted or not. Charles Stross explains.

proposals in the UK and USA to carry out bombing strikes against the Assad regime in Syria are not only criminal (in the absence of a firm UN Security Council ruling on the matter), they're stupid. One such imperial adventure might be an accident, two might be a coincidence, but embarking on a third one within a decade of the blood-spattered fiasco that was Iraq and the traumatic counter-insurgency occupation that was Afghanistan should be grounds for incarcerating any western politician proposing it in an institution for the criminally insane.

Luxury is just another drug. [Article]

Luxury is best appreciated as a strong and interesting contrast to, rather than the fabric of, your daily life.

Some thoughts on luxury as a drug, from Mr. Money Moustache.

My next read: The Tender Bar [Link]

When you read a book review that reads like this, it is hard not to pick up the book!

The Cost of Privacy - [Article]

Privacy is a good thing, right?  asks Scott Adams.

The Debate over intervention in Syria [Article]

George Packer articulates a typical conversation around the US intervention in Syria. Worth your time.

“An opera of breasts”: But I really did love putting the stories in Playboy! [Article]

Amy Grace Loyd was hired to be the literary editor of Playboy magazine - " Saul Bellow, Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ursula Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates – all were repeat contributors to Playboy" (no I didn't know that either!). She writes about her experience in this neatly written article.

Hefner may be an anachronism to many, but he’s also an iconoclast of a distinctly American variety.  My time there made me a better editor, probably a better and certainly a more resilient person; and even when I knew I had no place there anymore, as the editorial direction changed and the New York offices and then, only a few years later, the Chicago offices closed, I didn’t regret a day of it. I still don’t. I was able to do things there as an editor that I’ll never be able to do anywhere else.

A look at Isaac Asimov's predictions from 1964, 50 years later [Article]

Asimov wasn't the only person to peer into the future and get it right. But take a look at what he predicted, in 1964:

“[M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.”