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Requiem for a Dream→
Aaron Swartz was brilliant and beloved. But the people who knew him best saw a darker side.
i can’t say enough good things about this article
(via the-feature)
There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science)
It is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in “It’s a Wonderful World” when he sang, “I see friends shaking hands, sayin ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.’”
Read more. [Image: Paramount Pictures]
A Yale law professor argues that we’re not doing enough to empower the minority voices in America—and change should start at the local level:
The ideas Gerken is known for first took shape, appropriately enough, as a disagreement. Several years ago, not long after she’d been hired as a young professor at Harvard, she sat in on a pair of lectures by Cass Sunstein, the influential law scholar who was then a professor at the University of Chicago. What she heard Sunstein say, in brief, was that societies in which dissenting voices are encouraged tend to be more prosperous than ones where they are not. Gerken sat in the back of the hall with a notepad and listened, writing furiously. “If you had looked back,” Gerken says, “you would have wondered, why is that junior professor sitting there scribbling like a crazy person? Is she transcribing this speech? But it was just the opposite.”
In fact, Gerken was writing down all the ways in which she thought Sunstein was wrong. What Sunstein didn’t seem to realize, she wrote, was that in order for minority groups to have real influence in politics—in order for them to make meaningful contributions to the way society works—they had to have more than the right to make their voices heard. They had to have the power to actually do things their way.
(via longreads)
Stop Catcalling Me→
When women are treated as if their bodies don’t serve a functional purpose and are simply on display for the enjoyment and valuation of male eyes, it doesn’t matter how much money you make or what advanced degree you’ve earned or how great a sense of self-worth you hold: you feel powerless. Powerless to prevent it, powerless to counteract it, powerless to transcend your own physiology.
“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”
Tim Kreider, “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” The New York TimesWhy The Avengers is the best TV show in movie theaters→
When Joss Whedon made the leap to the big screen, he took some lessons from the small one with him.
Great Articles about Money→
tetw:
A Tetw reading list
The Best of Freakonomics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt - How to make it, why we steal it , how to bet with it, and how it motivates us. A selection of the best articles from NYT column that became an international sensation.
To Have is To Owe by David Graeber - A lot of people have little understanding of what money really is - if you want to find out, this classic article is the place to start.
Three great articles about the financial crisis by Michael Lewis - The world’s top financial reporter heads to Greece, Iceland and Ireland to find out how the credit crisis changed the world.
Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities by Michael Lewis - Another classic Lewis piece about how a 15-year-old became the first ever minor to face prosecution for stock market fraud.
The Great American Bubble Machine by Matt Taibbi - “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
The $20 Theory of the Universe by Tom Chiarella - A beginner’s guide to bribery. Find out just how far greasing people’s palms with a $20 bill can get you.
Why the Poor Pay More by DeNeen L. Brown - “The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. A primer on the economics of poverty.”
Inconspicuous Consumption by Virgina Postrel - What do the things you spend your money on say about you?
Is Free the Future by Malcolm Gladwell - The author asks whether the internet will make paying money for stuff a thing of the past.
(Source: tetw)
![theatlantic:
There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science)
It is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in “It’s a Wonderful World” when he sang, “I see friends shaking hands, sayin ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.’”
Read more. [Image: Paramount Pictures]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/32b080c4068cfcf0fb5731b42fb58b4e/tumblr_mh6vluedRx1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)


