Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, October 1842:
Thou shalt read Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Proclus, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch, Apuleius, Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Bacon, Marvell, More, Milton, Molière, Swedenborg, Goethe.
There are 120,000 excess deaths per year attributed to ten workplace conditions and they cause approximately $190 billion in incremental health care costs. That makes the workplace the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. — higher than Alzheimer’s, higher than kidney disease.
Both articles report the findings published by Jeffrey Pfeffer in Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It.
I have not read the book yet, but I definitely will.
Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing.
The first step is to become a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature.
Writers perforce read differently from everyone else. Most people ask three questions of what they read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed?
Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them: (4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit.
More here.
These are readings Hemingway recommended to a young person aspiring to be a writer. The whole story here.
Links for the book will take you to Project Gutenberg.
Information and parody. Well done!
Mucho se equivocan (…) quienes afirman que una tableta electrónica borrará el libro de papel de las necesidades humanas. Porque un libro no sirve sólo para leer.
Sirve también para que su peso tranquilice las manos lectoras, para subrayar y ajar sus páginas con el uso, para regalar el ejemplar leído a personas a las que quieres. Para ver amarillear sus páginas con los años sobre los viejos subrayados que hiciste cuando eras distinto a quien ahora eres. Para decorar -no hay cuadro ni objeto comparable en belleza- una habitación o una casa. Para amueblar una vida.
Bien dicho, Arturo.
A presentation by Andrew Rashbass, CEO of The Economist Group, calls the old publishing models of web and print “irredeemably broken,” with publishers requiring “urgent re-examination of everything that constitutes a media business.”
The concept of Lean Back 2.0 is relatively simple — the use of tablets and e-readers is growing at the expense of print and web use, with The Economist‘s iPad readers spending on average around 90 minutes with the app each week.
Unlike the desktop and laptop web experience, these devices are allowing users to read at their leisure.
Some key facts from the presentation:
- 42 percent of tablet users regularly read in-depth articles, with another 40 percent reading them occasionally
- Tablet users are three times more likely to read an article than watch a news video
- A user’s eye activity is far more focused on an iPad app than on a website
- Some users believe the content received in an app is even worth more than content received elsewhere, with a large majority saying they find it easier to learn new things and enjoy the news more when using apps
- The Economist projects a fall of over 50 percent in the preference for paper over other formats in the next 2 years, with tablet preference growing to over 20 percent.
Dear Boys and Girls,
Congratulations on the new library, because it isn’t just a library.
It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you—and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.
Signed, Isaac Asimov
via Letters of Note.
Every year Britain’s Chartered Management Institute awards a Management Book of the Year and this year’s choice is Managing by McGill University‘s Henry Mintzberg.
Following the announcement Mintzberg said “I would be honoured by this lovely prize in any event. But it has special meaning for me because, of all the places I go in this world, none matches the U.K. for intellectual stimulation. The Brits combine curiosity and empathy with wonderful individuality, by which I mean, not acting for oneself, but thinking for oneself. So to be honoured in this way in the U.K. is especially delightful.
Announcing the new Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge device (BOOK). It’s a revolutionary breakthrough 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 disk.
Here’s how it works: Each BOOK is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper, each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. These pages are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder that keeps the sheets in their correct sequence. The user scans each sheet optically, registering information directly into his or her brain. A flick of the finger takes the user to the next sheet.
The BOOK may be taken up at any time and used by merely opening it. The “browse” feature allows the user to move instantly to any sheet and to move forward or backward as desired. Most BOOKs come with an “index” feature that pinpoints the exact location of any selected information for instant retrieval. An optional “BOOKmark” accessory allows the user to open the BOOK to the exact place left in a previous session–even if the BOOK has been closed. BOOKmarks fit universal design standards; thus a single BOOKmark can be used in BOOKs by various manufacturers.
Portable, durable, and affordable, the BOOK is the entertainment wave of the future, and many new titles are expected soon, due to the surge in popularity of its programming tool, the Portable Erasable-Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language Stylus (PENCILS).
