New Statesman: Are you writing anything at the moment?Diana Athill: I’m not. I do a bit of book reviewing and write the odd article, but I haven’t got another book going.
NS: Why is that?
Athill: If something comes out, it has to have gone in first. By the time you’re 94, not a hell of a lot goes in. I’m not a novelist; I haven’t got the imagination to be a novelist – I’ve always written about experience, but I’ve had it all now and have said it all.
It’s shameful that Apple has asked its users to put so much trust in its cloud services, and not put better security mechanisms in place to protect them. AppleIDs are too easily reset, which effectively makes iCloud a data security nightmare. I’ve had person after person after person report similar instances to me, some providing documentation showing how easily their Apple accounts were compromised.And due to Apple’s opacity, I have no way of knowing if things have improved. Apple has refused to tell me in what ways its policies weren’t followed “completely” in my case. Despite being an Apple user for nearly 20 years and having generally positive feelings toward the company, I no longer trust it to do the right thing in terms of protecting my data. I’ve turned off its Find My services and won’t turn them back on.
Amazon also had a glaring security flaw, and although it has fixed that exploit, the flaw’s mere existence should serve as a warning to all of us about all of our other accounts. We don’t often know what’s required to issue a password reset, or have someone get into our account through a company’s tech support system.
But hackers do.
All Cambridge editions of the Book of Common Prayer made sure that the Communion of the Sick finished at the foot of a right hand-hand page, so that the eye would not be caught by the heading of the service which, logically if unhappily, immediately followed – the Burial of the Dead. But neither the Oxford nor the Queen’s Printer showed the same delicacy.
I’m not the least bit surprised that a cat would be proofreading the secrets of the Bible.Inky cat footprints!From p. 170 of Clavis Bibliorum: The Key of the Bible, Unlocking the Richest Treasury of the Holy Scriptures by Francis Roberts (1675). Original from Princeton University. Digitized August 12, 2008.
I was in a diner the other day and picked up a printed newspaper. To be precise, I picked up the comics section. The thought that occurred to me was: Now this, here, is a fully dead format. But what fun, while it lived! The comics page! Shouldn’t there be some new-school version of this? Some webcomic aggregator that pulls a bunch of the best together and lays them out in a great big liquid wall to fit phones and tablets and big broad monitors alike? And pays a bit back to each creator?
Look, it’s a 20-foot-high cardboard baby in the desert! Via @karlsteel on Twitter.
The Family Research Council’s president, Tony Perkins, said Thursday that “Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center.” This goes too far. Nobody gave Corkins a license to kill. But at the same time, “hate,” a strong word, has been used too loosely — whether it’s Mitt Romney telling President Obama to take his “campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago,” or the Southern Poverty Law Center lumping a Christian policy group in with hooded bigots.Late Thursday, the law center fired back at Perkins, defending its categorization of the FRC as a hate group because it “has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people.” The center said that Perkins should stop putting out “claims that are provably false” about gay people.
Yes, Perkins should stop doing that. But even if he doesn’t, the Southern Poverty Law Center should stop listing a mainstream Christian advocacy group alongside neo-Nazis and Klansmen.
In a few short years, we have gone from anonymous experts to having all of our most distant acquaintances monitor our guilty pleasures and blind spots. The release of your work playlist isn’t quite the same as topless Facebook photos; and for all I know, there’s nobody out there paying attention to what I play on Spotify. But the extent to which this stream of endless disclosures of what we’re doing, where we’re eating, what we’re listening to exposes, even revels in, the ordinariness of our lives places us far, far from the days of obsessing over what specific music or movies to list in our social media profiles circa 2002. Instead of self-creation cooked up behind the veil, we’re absolutely laid bare without even realizing it. Even as Tumblr and Pinterest turn curation into a commodity, Facebook and Twitter continue to rule the day. We can’t change who we are. Maybe the best we can hope for now is to keep our exposure limited to what it might have been before all this social media junk got started. Not because we’re so interesting or petrifying, but because the endless drivel of the ordinary is never flattering.
Mrs. Rowling,I read your statement that the wizarding gene is dominant. I have heard criticism that this does not explain muggle-borns, squibs, or the steady inheritance pattern of magical abilities; but I got your back. Magical ability could be explained by a single autosomal dominant gene if it is caused by an expansion of trinucleotide repeats with non-Mendelian ratios of inheritance.
It used to be that paper was made from rags, a shortage of which gripped the Western world in the early nineteenth century. In Nova Scotia, a young logger and poet named Charles Fenerty proposed a solution: Why not make paper out of wood? (Rags have to be made; trees grow.) I entertain an opinion that our common forest trees, either hard or soft wood, but more especially the fir, spruce, or poplar, on account of the fibrous quality of their wood, might easily be reduced by a chafing machine, and manufactured into paper of the finest kind, he wrote in 1844.Fenerty died in 1892 without ever having secured intellectual property rights to, or a following for, his notion. It took German mechanic Friedrich Gottlob Keller to actually develop a machine that realized Fenerty’s vision. Keller sold his invention to an entrepreneur; a patent was granted; an industry was born.
For a while, the process was unidirectional. Wood was pulped into paper for books, but books were rarely turned back into blank sheets. That changed during the First World War, when the U.S. government, hard up for raw materials, inaugurated the Waste Reclamation Service. As of last count, according to the Green Press Initiative, about 13 percent of the paper fiber in new books is from old books and other recycled sources.