by referendum — of a new Constitution that approaches development not as an end, but as a means of achieving a collective state of “Buen Vivir” (Good Living), or “Sumak Kausay” in Kichwa. The concept is rooted in aboriginal philosophy, emphasizing environmental conservation and social organization based on mutual solidarity. It is evident in Ecuador’s constitutional support for human rights and nature’s “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate.”
Source : Polis
He said he was also concerned about the rise of relatively restrictive smartphones, at the expense of PCs or Macs. “One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That’s kind of important to me, and that’s also kind of important to the whole future of the internet … obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.”
Source : The Guardian
Britain already has a range of legal protections for brands and copyright holders, but the Olympic Games demand their own rules. Since the Sydney Games in 2000, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has required bidding governments to commit to introducing bespoke legislation to offer a further layer of legal sanction.
Source : Guardian
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type
– Oscar Wilde
For years the Bauhaus building was known to the wider world mostly through a few black-and-white photographs that stress its more easily copied details, but miss the point that it was a framework for the creative energy of the school.
Source : The Guardian
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, this heightening it meaning. The city is like poetry it compress all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.
– E.B. White on NYC
Most people who were brought up in the past half century have been taught to live this way, by their own rules, building the world they want. That belief—Klinenberg calls it “the cult of the individual”—may be the closest thing American culture has to a common ideal, and it’s the premise on which a lot of single people base their lives. If you’re ambitious and you’ve had to navigate a tough job market, alone can seem the best way to approach adulthood.
Source : The New Yorker
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
Source : Letter of Note
The Stoic philosopher Epicurus maintained that free will was only an illusory sense we experience when the actions necessitated for us by circumstance fortuitously coincide with what we happen to want – it’s my belief that this perfectly characterises the psychotic spatial awareness of the vast majority of contemporary urban dwellers; while the existential threats afflicting women, and the state-sanctioned ones that impinge, in particular, on young black men in British cities, have been internalised even by those – the white, the middle-aged and the middle class – who have no reason to be so trammelled.
Source : The Guardian
Though big cities have more than their share of trailblazers, with gentrification they’re attracting wealthier and more risk-averse, group-oriented types,” says Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which explored the question of which cities are most creative and why. “Hipster urban cultures can be just as monolithic, homogenous and creativity-squelching as any other,” he says.
Source : WSJ
Collected Reading 