The Almost Lost Art of Doing Nothing_book review

By Negar Azarshab

Medium, 24 April 2024

In today’s fast-paced world, we often find ourselves caught up in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, constantly bombarded with stimuli from our phones, computers, and the endless stream of news and social media updates. This constant state of busyness can lead to feelings of stress, anxiety, and even burnout.

Dany Laferrière’s book, The Almost Lost Art of Doing Nothing, offers a refreshing and thought-provoking perspective on the importance of slowing down and savoring the simple pleasures in life. Through a series of witty and insightful essays, Laferrière explores the various ways in which we’ve lost touch with the art of doing nothing, and he provides practical suggestions for how to reclaim it.

A World of Distractions

Laferrière begins by lamenting the fact that we live in a world that seems to be constantly at war with stillness and silence. We’re surrounded by noise and distractions, and we’re constantly on the go. This has led to a decline in our ability to relax and focus, and it has also made it more difficult to appreciate the beauty of the world around us.

Laferrière argues that this constant state of busyness is not only unhealthy but also counterproductive. When we’re constantly rushing from one thing to the next, we’re never able to fully engage with any of it. We’re more likely to make mistakes, and we’re less likely to be creative or innovative.

The Importance of Stillness

Laferrière makes a compelling case for the importance of stillness and silence. He argues that these are not luxuries but necessities. When we take the time to slow down and quiet our minds, we open ourselves up to a world of possibilities. We become more aware of our surroundings, and we’re better able to appreciate the simple things in life.

Laferrière offers a number of suggestions for how to reclaim the art of doing nothing. He suggests that we start by making a conscious effort to unplug from our devices and spend some time in nature. He also encourages us to practice mindfulness and meditation.

A Call to Slow Down

The Almost Lost Art of Doing Nothing is a call to action. It’s a reminder that we don’t have to live our lives at a breakneck pace. We can choose to slow down, savor the moment, and enjoy the simple things in life.

This book is a must-read for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed or stressed by the demands of modern life. It’s a reminder that it’s okay to take a break sometimes, and that doing nothing can be just as productive as doing something.

Here are some additional thoughts on the book:

• Laferrière’s writing is witty and engaging, and he makes his points in a way that is both thought-provoking and entertaining.
• The book is full of practical advice for how to reclaim the art of doing nothing.
• The Almost Lost Art of Doing Nothing is a timely and important book that has the potential to change the way we live our lives.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a way to slow down and simplify their life.

All That We Share_advertising

As this Danish TV ad opens, Danes file quietly onto a soundstage, stepping into outlined areas on the floor — areas meant to define them. "The High Earners" versus "Those Just Getting By." "Those We Trust" versus "Those We Try To Avoid." Lifelong Danes, versus those new to Denmark. Divisions you will find not just in Denmark, but in any country on Earth.

However, a man begins to ask questions: "Who in this room was the class clown?", "Who are stepparents?", "How many of you love to dance?" Quickly, the "Us versus Them" narrative falls apart. People begin to step out of their so-called defining boxes. It's a heartwarming reminder that our perceived labels do not define us. If we look below the surface, we can find common ground with those we perceive as most different to ourselves.

A jewel of an advert and a moving tribute to a small great country. Advertising can indeed help make a better world.

SLOW PUNCTURE

 Today is Punctuation Day, apparently, so here's a poem called "Slow Puncture," by Brian Bilston.

No one’s ready for this

Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke.

By Sarah Jeong, The Verge, August 22, 2024 (excerpts)

An explosion from the side of an old brick building. A crashed bicycle in a city intersection. A cockroach in a box of takeout. It took less than 10 seconds to create each of these images with the Reimagine tool in the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. They are crisp. They are in full color. They are high-fidelity. There is no suspicious background blur, no tell-tale sixth finger. These photographs are extraordinarily convincing, and they are all extremely fucking fake. 

Anyone who buys a Pixel 9 — the latest model of Google’s flagship phone, available starting this week — will have access to the easiest, breeziest user interface for top-tier lies, built right into their mobile device. This is all but certain to become the norm, with similar features already available on competing devices and rolling out on others in the near future. When a smartphone “just works,” it’s usually a good thing; here, it’s the entire problem in the first place.

Photography has been used in the service of deception for as long as it has existed. (Consider Victorian spirit photos, the infamous Loch Ness monster photograph, or Stalin’s photographic purges of IRL-purged comrades.) But it would be disingenuous to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility. It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph. Fake was the exception, not the rule. 

If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express. There was no reason to express why these photos matter, why they are so pivotal, why we put so much value in them. 

Our trust in photography was so deep that when we spent time discussing veracity in images, it was more important to belabor the point that it was possible for photographs to be fake, sometimes. This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after...

No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?

We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature. 

We are fucked!

Link to the full text.

What the 2024 Olympics tells us about global geopolitics

1. By Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy, SKEMA Business School and Paul Widdop, Associate Professor of Sport Business, Manchester Metropolitan University
2. 
   
3. Published in The Conversation, August 2, 2004
4. 
   

Since the Olympic Games in Paris began, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has posted the statement “This is France!” several times on his social media platforms.

Macron has been implicitly asserting that he is delivering on his personal vision of the event, and of France. Since his election in 2017, he has sought to project a diverse, cosmopolitan and outward-facing France while at the same time strengthening existing preconceptions of its style, culture and history.

The opening ceremony was therefore the embodiment of Macron’s ambitions. It combined landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and key figures from French history, such as Marie Antoinette, with cultural, musical and fashion representations of modern France. These included surfers, rappers and members of LGBTQ+ communities.

Since the Olympic Games in Paris began, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has posted the statement “This is France!” several times on his social media platforms.

Macron has been implicitly asserting that he is delivering on his personal vision of the event, and of France. Since his election in 2017, he has sought to project a diverse, cosmopolitan and outward-facing France while at the same time strengthening existing preconceptions of its style, culture and history.

The opening ceremony was therefore the embodiment of Macron’s ambitions. It combined landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and key figures from French history, such as Marie Antoinette, with cultural, musical and fashion representations of modern France. These included surfers, rappers and members of LGBTQ+ communities.

Meanwhile, those from the extreme right have long resented and resisted Macron’s Parisian-centric and urban-led vision of diversity and modernity. This was evident in reactions to the opening ceremony’s depiction of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper, in which drag queens, a transgender model and a naked singer appeared. France’s Catholic church condemned the sketch as a “mockery of Christianity”.

Paris Olympic organisers have since issued an apology, though this is unlikely to have placated Muslim communities around the world. Some among them labelled parts of the opening ceremony “absurd”, “disgusting” and a “promotion of satanic forms”. Others saw it as an attempt by the west to impose its values on them.

This sentiment was apparently shared by the Chinese state broadcaster, China Central Television, whose event commentators went quiet during the segments in which members of LGBTQ+ communities appeared. China has a record of seeking to suppress these communities.

For some French Muslims, there may also have been dismay at the depiction of a religious scene at an event being staged by a French state entity. After all, it was announced late last year that Muslim women would not be allowed to wear their hijabs when competing for France at the Olympics. The justification for this decision was that it would breach the country’s secularist principles, which create a clear separation between religion and state.

That decision came at an especially sensitive time, following the Hamas-led October 7 attacks and Macron’s invitation to France’s chief Rabbi to light Hannukah candles at the Élysée Palace. The war in Gaza continues to cast a shadow over the Games. Indeed, there are rumours of some athletes being prepared to withdraw from the event if they are required to compete directly against an Israeli athlete.

The simmering threat of such direct action has already manifested itself at the Games. During a football match between Mali and Israel on July 24, members of the crowd unfurled banners condemning the latter country and waved flags in support of Palestine. The vast majority (95%) of Malians are Muslim, and there are 120,000 people from Mali living in France.

Limited Russian presence

Israel is not the only country where there is some disquiet. Following recent doping scandals and the invasion of Ukraine, most Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from participating in Paris. A few athletes are competing as neutrals, but national flags, anthems and other national symbols are banned, and no government or state officials have been invited.

The exclusion of Russia has led to speculation that its agents may have been responsible for a series of railway sabotages that caused significant travel disruption on the opening day of the Games. Though nobody was hurt or killed, such attacks undermine public confidence, impose economic and social costs on people, and were clearly an attempt to tarnish the image of France.

France has a long-held reputation for successfully delivering numerous major events each year. However, there was also disruption at the Uefa Champions League final in 2022, which was being staged at the Stade de France (the main Olympic venue this summer). Many Liverpool supporters were put through a traumatising experience when entering the stadium, and riot police teargassed spectators while failing to protect them from being attacked by local thugs.

This followed Paris quickly stepping in to stage the match after Uefa removed St Petersburg’s right to host the game following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Whether these events were another deliberate attempt to diminish France or just a coincidence remains debatable.

Some have suggested that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has wanted to undermine the IOC for much of the past decade. He sees it as a western institution governed by values and rules that maintain a dominance he resents.

As such, Russia has been planning to host the World Friendship Games a little more than a month after the Paris Olympics finishes. While there is some confusion over whether the event will be postponed to 2025, there are claims that more than 100 nations have already committed to participating in what may ultimately come to pose an existential threat to the modern Olympic movement.

The IOC normally does its utmost to control the places and spaces that it selects to host Olympic events, whether that means suppressing displays of activism, preventing acts of terrorism, or even minimising the commercial intrusion of brands that have no legal right to associate with the event.

However, such is the currently fractious nature of local and global geopolitics that we should expect more controversy before the Olympic flame in Paris is finally extinguished.

Volcano by JUNGLE: The Music and The Dancing of Our Time

Volcano is a hypnotic dance film by London-based company Jungle, now on YouTube. Not only is Shay Latukolan’s choreography mesmerizing, but also the dancing, the styling, the lighting, the camera work, the cinematography are pure joy. People are comparing some of their dance movements to Bob Fosse. Although the group’s striking series of 14 one-shot music videos has gone viral on social media, you may call Jungle a band, or a music collective — just don’t call them famous, as they are not interested in notions of celebrity. Sill, Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland’s electrifying electronic mix of funk, hip-hop and jazzy/techno beat will get you hooked. Sit back and watch the 49-min. film on your computer or on your TV screen. You are are going to flip out. It's simply a masterpiece of modern dance. Brilliant beyond words. Enjoy it! 

B.O.O.K.

Introducing B.O.O.K., the new Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge device.

B.O.O.K is a revolutionary break-through in technology: no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It's so easy to use, even a child can operate it. Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere, even sitting in an armchair by the fire; yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM disc.

Here's how it works: B.O.O.K. is constructed of sequentially-numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. The pages are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence. Opaque Paper Technology (OPT) allows manufacturers to use both sides of the sheet, doubling the information density and cutting costs. Experts are divided on the prospects for further increases in information density; for now, B.O.O.K.s with more information simply use more pages. Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into your brain. A flick of the finger takes you to the next sheet.

B.O.O.K. may be taken up at any time and used merely by opening it. B.O.O.K. never crashes or requires rebooting, though, like other devices, it can become damaged if coffee is spilled on it and it becomes unusable if dropped too many times on a hard surface. The "browse" feature allows you to move instantly to any sheet, and move forward or backward as you wish. Many come with an "index" feature, which pinpoints the exact location of any selected information for instant retrieval.

An optional "B.O.O.K.mark" accessory allows you to open B.O.O.K. to the exact place you left it in a previous session -- even if the BOOK has been closed. B.o.o.k.marks fit universal design standards; thus, a single bookmark can be used in B.O.O.K.s by various manufacturers. Conversely, numerous B.O.O.K.markers can be used in a single B.O.O.K. if the user wants to store numerous views at once. The number is limited only by the number of pages in the B.O.O.K. You can also make personal notes next to B.O.O.K. text entries with optional programming tools, like Portable Erasable Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language Styli (P.E.N.C.I.L.S.).

Portable, durable, and affordable, B.O.O.K. is being hailed as a precursor of a new entertainment wave. B.O.O.K.'s appeal seems so certain that thousands of content creators have committed to the platform and investors are reportedly flocking to invest. Look for a flood of new titles soon.

+ El libro, dice Umberto Eco, es como la rueda: una vez inventado no se puede hacer nada mejor. Cada 23 de abril, cuando se conmemora el Día del Libro, hace regresar la polémica sobre la agonía de este producto, a punto de ser arrojado al basurero de la historia, según sus enemigos.

En una obra reciente (Nadie acabará con los libros), Eco y J. C. Carrière conversan sobre ese asunto y se preguntan por los efectos de la rápida caducidad de los nuevos soportes (vídeo, cedé, DVD). Esa caducidad impide ver lo que compramos hace 10 años con los reproductores actuales, en contraste con la facilidad con que la continuidad del soporte libro permite leer uno escrito hace siglos.

Circula por la red este vídeo descacharrante sobre la última novedad en materia de lectura, un producto caracterizado por no necesitar cables, circuitos ni baterías, utilizable en cualquier lugar, que puede ser escaneado ópticamente para ser registrado directamente por el cerebro, y cuyo nombre es B.O.O.K.

Puede ser una fantasía de nostálgicos, pero es cierto que las cerillas hubieran sido consideradas un gran adelanto de haberse inventado después, y no antes, que los mecheros. Además, también se auguró el fin de la pintura con la fotografía, el del teatro con el cine, y el del cine con la televisión; y fallaron las casandras. Por lo demás, incluso si el libro de papel desapareciera, seguirían siendo necesarios los escritores, lo cual es una garantía de continuidad. Como advirtió Bertolt Brecht a los generales, sus bombarderos necesitan hombres que los piloten. No existen máquinas capaces de escribir libros digitales.

Artículo relacionado: Quiero leer en papel

Brexit, a still life

 

The 10 Commandments belong in (some) places of worship — not in public schools

Photo/Brad Bowie/The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate via the AP / Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signs bills related to his education plan on Wednesday, June 19, 2024, at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette, La. Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

By St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board (TNS), June 24, 2024

Do Americans have the right to not practice religion?

When the question is phrased like that, even most fervent religious believers out there would likely concede that, yes, non-belief (like belief itself) must qualify as a fundamental American right.

Yet that right is under frontal attack, from a religiously driven political movement operating under the premise that if government doesn't promote religion, it is by definition attacking it.

That premise is not only backward but is a slippery slope toward theocracy. The latest slide comes in Louisiana, with a new law requiring that every public school and college post the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the law Wednesday. It makes his state the first to test the Constitution's church-state separation in this manner since a U.S. Supreme Court opinion in 1980 that found a Kentucky requirement to display the commandments in public schools violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

That clause is unambiguous: Congress (and, by extension, the states) "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

As clear as that seems, it won't necessarily be clear to today's radical-right Supreme Court. The conservative majority in 2022 upheld a public high school football coach's right to pray on the school's football field after games and invite his players to join him. The ruling brushed off the obvious implied pressure the coach created on his players to pray.

The Louisiana law goes beyond merely implied pressure: Every student attending publicly funded schools in the state will literally be a captive audience to a religious doctrine specific to Judeo-Christian faith. The new law even sets minimum dimensions for the commandment displays (11 by 14 inches) and mandates that they must be "in a large, easily readable font."

That slippery slope we mentioned? This is what it looks like.

Defenders of the new law maintain that the commandments aren't solely a religious statement but a historical document of cultural principles ingrained in the laws of America and elsewhere over the ages.

That may apply to some of the commandments — the prohibitions on murder, theft and false witness, for example.

But what is an adherent to polytheist religions like Hinduism or Buddhism supposed to do with "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"? And what is an atheist supposed to do with any of it?

In fact, even many of the Judeo-Christian faithful may discover that with this law, Louisiana officially relegates their beliefs to secondary status as well. The law specifies wording that religious scholars say generally represents a Protestant version of the commandments — a version distinct from those recognized by Catholics and Jews.

What is it that business conservatives always say about the free market? The government isn't supposed to pick winners and losers? Shouldn't something as complex and personal as faith have at least that level of insulation from government?

Allowing the religious beliefs of a few to dictate public policy for everyone creates dangers that go beyond the merely philosophical.

There's some irony in the fact that Louisiana's new law is fervently supported by the same conservative movement that has turned school board meetings into culture-war battlefields over books and curriculum.

They argue that teaching racial history or gender issues in schools strays from legitimate education and into the realm of cultural indoctrination. But it's OK to force religious belief (and, in fact, one specific version of religious belief) into every classroom?

If this law stands, every public school student in Louisiana will face what amounts to a daily religious sermon — whether they (or their parents) like it or not.

Reading is sexy

Photo: John R. Hamilton, 1958