The story behind the first line of The Sounds of Silence Adapted from Sandy Greenberg’s memoir: “Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: How Daring Dreams and Unyielding Friendship Turned One Man’s Blindness into an Extraordinary Vision for Life.”… Lyrics It began when Arthur “Art” Garfunkel, a Jewish kid from Queens, enrolled in Columbia University. During freshman… Read More “Hello darkness, my old friend…”
Even while hammering out the final details of his £35bn ($44bn) purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk took some time out this weekend to tweet. He likes tweeting, does the world’s richest man, usually from what he calls his “porcelain throne” (that detail disclosed on Twitter, naturally enough). This one was a photo of Bill Gates, zeroing… Read More Elon Musk is the king of trolls in an age of troll politics / What better owner for Twitter than master of the ill-advised tweet?
When my daughter asked why she couldn’t have an Alexa, I told her it is because Alexa steals your dreams and sells them It is often said that people are entitled to their opinions. But are they really? Do you have a God-given right to believe that torture is good, or that the moon… Read More Book review – Freedom to Think: the big tech threat to free thought
Two Strangers Who Meet Five Times screened at the following festivals throughout 2017 and 2018 – winning the following awards. Los Angeles Film Awards Paris Play Film Festival – WINNER BEST SHORT LA Shorts Awards Mindfield Film Festival, Albuquerque – WINNER BEST SHORT San Luis Obispo International Film Festival – WINNER BEST NARRATIVE SHORT New… Read More Two Strangers Who Meet Five Times. By Marcus Markou
If you’re unlucky enough to reside in a town where data centers house computer servers storing everything from financial data for giant corporations to military secrets, you’re likely to find that a loud, whining noise becomes life’s agonizing background. The sound peaks and subsides, but it’s always there, never allowing you to fully relax. Eventually,… Read More Lynn Paramore: Our Economic System is Making Us Mentally Ill
Julien Benda’s classic book on the toxic mix of intellectuals and power is its own paradox Treason of the Intellectuals by Julien Benda Reviewed by Gustav Jönsson The title of Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs – The Treason of the Intellectuals – has become a synecdoche for a tradition that upholds truth in the face of moral… Read More Treason of the Intellectuals
Mann returned to Europe in 1952, never to leave again… it was politics that had brought him to America, and politics that pushed him away. The mind is always in exile.. “I am an American,” Thomas Mann said during a radio interview in 1940. If he sounded relieved, it was because he was: He had… Read More Book review: How Thomas Mann escaped to America and waged a moral battle against Hitler
It is tempting to harness Civilization and Its Discontents as a guide to our contemporary political morass, but doing so may obscure its most valuable message. Civilization and Its Discontents; translated by James Strachey and edited by Samuel Moyn Sigmund Freud was an ambivalent man, especially when it came to politics. He often held conflicting… Read More Udi Greenberg: Freud and the Miseries of Politics
During the months that the Covid virus ensured that just about every Indian lost someone they knew, many religious institutions across the country stepped in to help: they organised hospital beds and vaccine camps, distributed food, clothes and masks, and on a rare occasion, offered to look after the educational needs of children orphaned by… Read More Chandan Gowda: Seeking a dharma for these times
After the truth-shower 