David Bowie's must-read books revealed. As a new version of the exhibition David Bowie Is opens this week at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curators have revealed a list of his top 100 must-read books, giving a fascinating insight into the mind of the influential musician and style icon. The show, which offered unprecedented access to Bowie's own archive, became the most popular ever mounted by London's V&A when it ran there earlier this year. As the Guardian's Alexis Petridis pointed out at the time, the Bowie story is so well-known that "unless it's content to retell a very hackneyed story indeed, David Bowie Is has to find a way of casting new light on some of the most over-analysed and discussed music in rock history. " The reading list, with books presented in chronological order rather than order of preference, provides Ontario with a new angle.
Political history features, in titles such as Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy, as well as collections of interviews. Forgotten songs and memories: Scottish folklore is o... Travellerspoint Mobile Site. Top 10 TED Talks That Could Change Your Life. 17 Beautiful Quotes From Novels In 2015 That'll Make You Wanna Curl Up With A Book. A Beginner's Guide to Drinking Better Oolong Tea. [Photographs: Vicky Wasik, unless otherwise noted] Imagine if you went to a bar and the only beers on the menu were the lightest, most crisp pilsners and darkest, most molassesy porters. No nutty brown ales, bitter-citrusy IPAs, or twangy sours. For a round or two, you'd probably make do. Pilsners can be great! For tea people in the U.S., this is pretty much everywhere.
But tell someone you'd like an oolong and they'll likely just stare. Oolongs are the wide, wide category of tea in between green and black, and through skilled, labor-intensive processing, a tea-maker can coax anything from buttery florals to deep chocolate to roasted nuts to tropical fruit out of a single batch of leaves. What We Talk About When We Talk About Oolongs [Photograph: Max Falkowitz] In a way, oolongs are the most cheffy teas out there.
So what does it mean to get an oolong right? As soon as you pluck a tea leaf, it starts to oxidize. Oolong tea leaves partially through their long withering process. 33 Websites That Will Make You a Genius. The web is increasingly becoming a powerful resource that can easily help you learn something new everyday. These awesome sites are just what you need. “I have no special talent, I am only passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein There is a good chance you’ll be able to put at least one of these learning tools to good use and come out as a better person than you were last year. These are some of the best websites that will make you smarter every day. BBC — Future — Making you smarter, every day. 2. 99U (YouTube) — Actionable insights on productivity, organization, and leadership to help creative people push ideas forward. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. iTunes U — Learning on the go, from some of the world’s top universities. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
Brain Pickings — Insightful long form posts on life, art, science, design, history, philosophy, and more. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. edX — Take online courses from the world’s best universities. 31. 32. 33. WIRED's security special: do not click here. Hours after January's murderous assault on Charlie Hebdo's office -- and on free speech itself -- Andrew Parker, director general of MI5, warned that intelligence agencies risked losing their ability to monitor "the dark places from where those who wish us harm can plot and plan". David Cameron pledged "legislation that makes sure we do not allow terrorists safe space to communicate". Encrypted communications, complained the US National Security Agency, the FBI and the Metropolitan Police, favour the bad guys. Only government-accessible back doors in every phone, app or laptop can prevent jihadists from undermining our society.
WIRED respectfully disagrees. Access to secure encryption is a fundamental principle of the open internet. Uncompromised communication tools allow us safely to transfer private business documents, secure our financial data, even exchange romantic secrets. That's why we've put together this accessible guide to encryption tools already on the market. How to use Tor. Taking Care of Your Finances Doesn't Have to Take Over Your Life. Actor Wil Wheaton Talks About His Anxiety Disorder to Assure Teens With Mental Illnesses That They Aren’t Alone. The Winners Of The 2015 Locus Awards Have Been Announced! 7 Cool Books That Bill Gates Loves.
A few hours ago, Bill Gates blogged his suggestions for summer reading. His previous year's suggestions were somewhat weighty tomes, but this year, he's suggesting books that he characterizes as "beach reading. " Here are his picks: Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh Gates comments: "Based on Brosh's wildly popular website, [the book] consists of brief vignettes and comic drawings about her young life.
The adventures she recounts are mostly inside her head, where we hear and see the kind of inner thoughts most of us are too timid to let out in public. " Of the seven Gates picked, two are among my favorite books. Based on Gates's comments, I can tell that the other five are right up my alley, too. As I think about the list, what strikes me as important isn't so much the books themselves but that Gates chooses to share his reading habits with the world. Consider: Gates is the richest man in the world with a net worth exceeding $80 billion. 12 Books Steve Jobs Wanted You to Read | Inc.com. Toward the end of his life, Steve Jobs was open to the idea of an afterlife.
Not long after his untimely death, a Buddhist sect claimed that Jobs had been reincarnated as a "celestial warrior-philosopher living in a mystical glass palace hovering above his old office. " If that's true, perhaps in the moments that's he's not screaming "No! No! No! " to the awkward way Tim Cook has launched the iWatch, Jobs is wondering why more people aren't reading the books he loves (or loved, as the case may be). What strikes me most about Jobs's list is that, unlike Bill Gates's list, almost all the books are about a single individual overcoming enormous odds and obstacles in order to transform either the world, himself, or both.
Sorta makes sense, eh? 1. 1984, by George Orwell What it's about: One man's desperate struggle against an all-pervasive state that is committed to controlling people's thoughts as well as their behaviors. 2. 3. Fun factoid: This was the only e-book found on Jobs's personal iPad 2. 10 of the best ways to enjoy Copenhagen … on a budget | Travel. See the city from the water As well as the pretty old houses and historic warehouses that line the waterside, many of Copenhagen’s key sites are also best viewed from the canal that runs north-south through the city. A great way to enjoy a water tour is to avoid the expensive tour operators and jump on one of the local Movia harbour buses.
These clunky, chugging yellow barges run roughly every 10-20 minutes, starting at Refshaleøen island and finishing at industrial Teglholmen. Buy a 24-hour ticket for DKK 80 (£7.60) and you can get on and off as many times as you like (price includes land buses, too) or pick up a single for £2.30 (both half-price for kids under 15) and just sit tight and tick off the Black Diamond library, royal buildings and hippy Christianshavn as you float past. Eat Noma-worthy food Ride like a local Stylish stays There are a few trendy, hot hostel-type places to stay but not all of them are conveniently located. Watch opera on the cheap Embrace street food. Beautiful Cracked Log Lamps Made From Imperfect Salvaged Wood That Can Also Be Used as Furniture. Exquisitely Detailed Wild Animal Masks Handcrafted From Hammered and Welded Steel.
Charting the podcast renaissance. Mobile.nytimes. Literature from across the globe plotted using Google Maps. A new Google Maps mashup is giving bookworms a sense of direction when it comes to picking out new reading material. Launched on 21 May by UK organisation Lovereading, the map plots 200 works of literature according to their key locations across the planet.
"We have had the idea of a book map for a while as so many books vividly take you to a specific location -- and I, for one, always like to read a book based on where I am going on holiday," director and co-founder of Lovereading Peter Crawshaw tells WIRED.co.uk. "However it took a bit longer to select the 200 books (that are in V1.0 of the map) and then do all the research and building. " Near to WIRED's own offices in London are plotted key locations from the Forsyte Saga, Charles Dickens' Bleak House and Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. We're also not too far away from Kings Cross station, where Harry Potter boards the Hogwarts Express. Stoicism. 1. Sources of our information on the Stoics Since the Stoics stress the systematic nature of their philosophy, the ideal way to evaluate the Stoics' distinctive ethical views would be to study them within the context of a full exposition of their philosophy.
Here, however, we meet with the problem about the sources of our knowledge about Stoicism. We do not possess a single complete work by any of the first three heads of the Stoic school: the ‘founder,’ Zeno of Citium in Cyprus (344–262 BCE), Cleanthes (d. 232 BCE) or Chrysippus (d. ca. 206 BCE). From these sources, scholars have attempted to piece together a picture of the content, and in some cases, the development of Stoic doctrine. 2. When considering the doctrines of the Stoics, it is important to remember that they think of philosophy not as an interesting pastime or even a particular body of knowledge, but as a way of life. 3.
An examination of Stoic ontology might profitably begin with a passage from Plato's Sophist. 4. 5. 6. Edge.org. Essentialism—what I’ve called "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind"—stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle, or a right triangle, were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect approximation to the ideal Platonic circle hanging in some abstract space. That works for geometric shapes like circles, but essentialism has been applied to living things and Ernst Mayr blamed this for humanity’s late discovery of evolution—as late as the nineteenth century. If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor, and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant.
Paleontologists will argue passionately about whether a particular fossil is, say, Australopithecus or Homo. Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology.
The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.