My top five books read this year in no particular order. Please share your top books of the year.
Tag: Society
Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell
A common peril is much the easiest way of producing homogeneity.
The picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly–that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.
Here is new York by E.B.White
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
Born poor? Bad luck, you have won last prize in the lottery of life
Yet it is this bad capitalism – and the socially immobile society that accompanies it – that has brought the British economy to its knees. A regular visitor to No 10 tells me wryly that the reason the government has lost the competence gene is that almost everyone he meets is an ex-public school boy like him.
Source : The Guardian
Will Self: Walking is political
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
Quote of the week
Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.
– Shakespeare
UN calls for overhaul of global financial system to benefit the poor
“Financial sectors have already returned to many of the old practices, even as public finances deteriorate and the recovery stalls,” he said. “Austerity measures are back on the agenda and resistance to financial regulation has begun in earnest.”
Source : The Guardian
Quote of the week – Education
And although literacy rates are notoriously difficult to assess, there is sufficient evidence (mostly drawn from signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time.2 (The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.3)
– Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Article: Al Murray on the Twitter joke trial: ‘Problem is, the law don’t do funny’
I did what I could to keep up with the flow of the legal argument and various examples of precedent. Where it seemed to be heading was this: context isn’t enough, if you’re going to make a joke, make sure that you make it clear that a joke’s a joke – if you make it clear that a joke is a joke, then it is a joke. So, when saying something you regard as a joke, in order to avoid loss of job and life ruination, say “joke!”
Source : Guardian
Collected Reading 