A Pretty Good Book Year

 books  Comments Off
Nov 272011
 

Guardian asked authors about some of their favourite new titles this year. It would seem it has been a good year. Nice to see some less talked-about newcomers appear on the list as well, like Chavs by Owen Jones. Eric Hobsbawm’s choice, incidentally.

bluenights

goldboy

therebutfor

chavs

catstable

marriageplot

atrocitology

manintower

pure

longlunch

Which have you enjoyed most this year?

 Posted by at 9:14 pm  Tagged with:

Who drew these?

 science and society  Comments Off
Nov 242011
 

smiling mac

The name of the woman is Susan Kare. Looking at her sketchbooks brings tears to my eyes (as it should to every Mac aficionado that started with rainbow-filled apples).

pointing hand

It looks like doodles you would make at the back of high school math notebook, no?

(Of course, via Kottke)

PS
This is wonderfully complemented with a little video of Larry Tesler speaking about how they worked on developing Mac’s graphical user interface.

At least they didn’t throw them away

 activism, books, libraries  Comments Off
Nov 152011
 

Update, 20th November: Unfortunately, they do destroy books. And they do hurt people.

library

This short Boing Boing post got me madly furious in less than a second.

Luckily, here is Huffington Post update on what really happened.

And here is a picture of books stored in dry and safe place.

Let’s hope tents for people will be allowed. It’s getting cold out there.

New beginnings

 activism  Comments Off
Nov 022011
 

Slavoj Žižek summarized his Zuccotti park address. The essay is different from the original speech. His attention focused on what is to be done. (via Dangerous Minds)

“But what do they want?” After all, this is the archetypal question addressed by a male master to a hysterical woman: “You whine and you complain, but do you know at all what you really want?” In the psychoanalytic sense, the protests effectively are a hysterical act, provoking the master, undermining his authority. And the question “But what do you want?” aims precisely to preclude the true answer — its real purpose is: “Tell it in my terms or shut up!”

The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn’t know what they are answers to, and it is up to the analyst to formulate the appropriate questions. We should treat the demands of the Wall Street protests in a similar way: Instead of wondering “What are they asking for? What are their demands and what are their proposed programs?”, intellectuals should see the Occupy protests as the answers for which we are not yet asking the right questions.