A quanto pare il disastro ferroviario per fortuna senza vittime (cinque feriti sul treno) è passato per adesso abbastanza inosservato da noi. Però il treno della Amtrak che centra la bisarca incastrata al passaggio a livello è una bomba.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03NkGLVbQLA

Money quote: "The driver and his dog were "shaken up" but uninjured in the collision, the sheriff's office said. Five people on board the train were transported to two area hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, the sheriff said. All patients involved in the incident have been treated released, a spokesperson for the hospitals told ABC News Saturday afternoon, though couldn't confirm how many there were total."

https://abcnews.go.com/US/dramatic-video-shows-amtrak-train-slamming-semi-truck/story?id=80619175

Ma voi lo sapevate che Facebook vuole cambiare nome? Secondo The Verge lo fa per due motivi: Zuckerberg vuole espandersi e definire il metaverso come sua grande invenzione, e poi perché la fiducia del pubblico sta crollando e serve un rebranding alla luce degli scansali attuali e dei probabili scandali futuri. Quale sarà il nome? Mistero.

Money quote: "I’m told that the new Facebook company name is a closely-guarded secret within its walls and not known widely, even among its full senior leadership. A possible name could have something to do with Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years. The name of that app was recently tweaked to Horizon Worlds shortly after Facebook demoed a version for workplace collaboration called Horizon Workrooms."

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/19/22735612/facebook-change-company-name-metaverse

Un articolo molto molto particolare su cosa di aspetta e cosa no, poi. E, dal punto di vista editoriale, la sensazione che la Paris Review ce l'ha fatta a svecchiarsi.

Money quote: "I’ve never seen a soul move through the air. I am not sure that we are anything more than a skin-bag of electrical impulses. But ghosts are different from the other uncanny citizens. They are only one step away from the known. To become a ghost, you don’t have to be bitten by a vampire or receive a curse or encounter a mad scientist or fall under the spell of a full moon. All you have to do is die."

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/09/16/all-you-have-to-do-is-die/

Smettere di preoccuparsi. Superare l'ansia. Magari fosse facile. O no?

Money quote: "After examining more than 10,500 potentially eligible studies, we found 36 (comprising more than 5,000 participants across nine countries) that were suitably high-quality and relevant for our purposes. These studies featured psychological interventions for combating worry and rumination that fell into seven broad type""

https://psyche.co/ideas/heres-how-to-take-back-your-life-from-long-term-worrying

Geni, come altro definirli?

Geni, come altro definirli?

Perché l’hype sul metaverso sta superando persino quella sul quantum computing

https://ovahi.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-hype-quantum-computing

C’è un pezzetto del folklore contemporaneo americano che passa attraverso la costruzione di non-luoghi alcolici. Uno di questi è la catena Margaritaville, che a sorpresa ha aperto anche su una terrazza che affaccia Times Square a New York. E ci racconta molto dell’America contemporanea.

Money quote: “But this is the kind of leisure Margaritaville is built on. Almost all the Margaritaville restaurants and resorts — a vaguely tropics-themed hospitality empire inspired by one of Jimmy Buffett’s most popular songs — exist within massive tourist destinations like Cozumel, Mexico, or Atlantic City, New Jersey. On the surface, Times Square feels like a natural addition. But while other locales can at least offer some seclusion from the world in the form of a beach or an island, Times Square is in the middle of everything. It is hectic, crowded, overpriced, and blatantly capitalistic, a place where no one actually lives and few New Yorkers hang out unless they’re seeing a show or bringing their out-of-town niece to the Disney Store. It has no chill. But maybe the point is it’s not unsalvageable. Amid the stress and the noise, if you delude yourself enough, you can turn off your brain and have fun. So for 24 hours, I tried.”

https://www.eater.com/22644505/margaritaville-times-square-new-york-hotel-restaurants

Si avvicinano le feste: non bisogna mai dimenticare i grandi classici del settore: Lercio al suo meglio

Tucker Carlson ha visto il fascismo: il nostro futuro è decisamente a rischio. Molto.

Money quote: "The Trump administration lavished Orban with praise. Trump has even likened the Hungarian strongman to himself, calling him a “tough man, but he is a respected man … probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s okay. You’ve done a good job, and you’ve kept your country safe.” Trump’s ambassador in Budapest confessed frankly that his boss envies Orban’s ability to bully and suppress his critics: “I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has, but he doesn’t.”"

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/tucker-carlson-has-seen-the-future-and-it-is-fascist.html

L'ho scoperto solo adesso grazie ad Andrea, ma all'inizio del 2022 chiude la mia rivista di critica letteraria preferita: The Believer.

Money quote; "“This was not an easy decision but a necessary one, unfortunately,” Jennifer Keene, dean of UNLV’s College of Liberal Arts, said in a news release. “The Believer consumed a significant portion of BMI’s resources. After reviewing the data with internal and external stakeholders, it was clear that there was no path forward to continue publishing the magazine. Print publications in general have been facing increasing headwinds in recent years, which makes them a financially challenging endeavor.”"

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-10-19/the-black-mountain-institute-will-cease-publishing-venerable-believer-literary-magazine

The final issue, No. 139, is scheduled to be published in February/March 2022.

Ci credete che c’è una serie tv, coprodotta e co-scritta da Amanda Peet, che racconta le storie di un dipartimento di letteratura inglese in un college americano? E che questa serie, scritta anche da una certa Annie Julia Wyman, che ha preso il suo dottorato di ricerca ad Harvard, è diventata un fenomeno su Netflix?

Money quote: ”Here is where I ought to disclose my own bias: I’m the child of an English professor, one I’ve interviewed for this website. For people like my dad, The Chair is something like Star Wars meets the Super Bowl; according to the texts I received this weekend, the show has managed to meet sky-high expectations. And that enthusiasm isn’t just coming from the ivory tower; following its release last Friday, The Chair has stayed squarely in Netflix’s Top 10, joining the likes of Grace and Frankie and Outer Banks. The average viewer may be more engaged by the presence of a Grey’s Anatomy alum than the casual references to affect theory, but it’s possible they’re picking up on the authenticity underneath.

Much of that authenticity comes from cocreator Annie Julia Wyman, who has an unusual credential for a Hollywood screenwriter: a PhD from Harvard, where she earned her doctorate in 2017 after penning her dissertation on the comic novel.”

https://www.theringer.com/tv/2021/8/24/22638728/the-chair-netflix-annie-julia-wyman-amanda-peet

RIcordi dalla pandemia. Fare puzzle per rimettersi insieme e rimettere insieme il mondo. Dietro però c'è molto di più.

Money quote: "Like many others, I turned to jigsaws at the start of the pandemic as a way to manage stress, and symbolically reimpose order on a chaotic world"

https://psyche.co/ideas/on-the-consolatory-pleasure-of-jigsaws-when-the-world-is-in-bits

La relatività dei sentimenti e degli stati d’animo, la capacità di apprezzare i miglioramenti e di evitare i peggioramenti, il bisogno di stare meglio, più che di stare bene ma per potersi sentire bene. Sono lezioni che troppo spesso dimentichiamo

Money quote: “The rest of my life will always be entwined with rheumatoid arthritis. But it’s my choice to also be something more, to not feel sick, to still find those shadows of a dancer, which is to say tiny flecks of magic, within me.”

https://longreads.com/2021/05/25/happy-is-a-relative-state

Oggi, 50 anni fa, andava in onda la prima puntata della serie animata di Lupin, quella a cui lavorarono Isao Takahata e Hayao Miyazaki.
https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/10/avventure-di-lupin-iii-anime/

Il più grande scandalo nel mondo del Bridge l’hanno fatto gli italiani. Sistematicamente. Reitaratamente. Ancora oggi. Sapevatelo.

Money quote: “More often than seemed mathematically conceivable, Fantoni and Nunes made unusual bids and low-percentage plays that succeeded brilliantly, suggesting that they were illegally exchanging information about their hands. But how?" The New Yorker: The Great Bridge Boycott. "At a recent tournament, thirty teams refused to compete when faced with the prospect of playing against Fulvio Fantoni, a notorious Italian player who has been accused of cheating."

https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-great-bridge-boycott

La cosa divertente, se non fosse che è da piangere, è che i cinquantenni se perdono il lavoro non ne trovano un altro a piangere. E invece, quando se ne vogliono andare in pensione (negli Usa, dove il sistema funziona in maniera diversa da noi), tutti a piangere che se ne vanno i migliori e i più competenti che sanno far funzionare le cose. Decidetevi.

Money quote: "Early retirements, whether desired or forced, will deprive the labor market of some of its most productive workers and have an impact on the economic recovery that is still too early to evaluate. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell this week cited a “significant number" of people saying they've retired as one reason companies are reporting labor shortages, although it's unclear if they'll eventually rejoin the job market."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-30/more-americans-are-considering-retirement-because-of-covid

Scusate il vuoto di post, è la prima volta che succede ma è stata una settimana luuuuunga e ho sbagliato io la gestione dei post (my bad!)

Intanto, mi sa che mi ci vorrà del tempo per riabituarmi al "vecchio normale" quando, tra qualche giorno, finita la prova lo restituirò...

Cosa vuol dire aver vissuto attraverso un lockdown o due? Lo racconta perfettamente Jon Mooallem

Money quote: "But it meant I’d never been forced, or forced myself, to acclimate to the virus as much as other people seemed to have done. I wasn’t learning to live within the odds. This made me uneasy — personally uneasy, because I interpreted it as a lack of toughness, but also ethically uneasy, because I knew that in a broken society like ours, my comfort came at the expense of other people’s demoralization and discomfort. Still, that’s what happened. And while I’m sure this left me with an exaggerated sense of the risks of leaving my particular bubble, the real problem was, I’d started chronically undervaluing the rewards. I’d been forgoing so much that forgoing felt easy. Too many things I imagined doing began to feel skippable, arbitrary, not a tragedy to decline. Either I was approaching some new state of equanimity and contentedness or I was depressed."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/magazine/spokane-indians-minor-league-baseball.html

Cos'è veramente Meta di Zuckerberg e perché i metaversi falliscono? - quelle che o tre cose per niente sbrodolate che volevo scrivere, su Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/cose-veramente-meta-di-zuckerberg-e-perche-i-metaversi-falliscono/