Mild surprise; slight disagreement
Lizzie Thomas’s Hidden Forest
I will state this as clearly as possible:You cannot buy Japanese Kobe beef in this country. Not in stores, not by mail, and certainly not in restaurants. No matter how much you have spent, how fancy a steakhouse you went to, or which of the many celebrity chefs who regularly feature “Kobe beef” on their menus you believed, you were duped. I’m really sorry to have to be the one telling you this, but no matter how much you would like to believe you have tasted it, if it wasn’t in Asia you almost certainly have never had Japan’s famous Kobe beef.
A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly as research for a short story I was writing, mostly because I became addicted to it. This convinced me of one thing: If the computer games which exist now had existed back in 1979 I would not have read any books, I think; I would not have seen writing as an adequate entertainment; I would not have seen going outdoors as sufficiently interesting to bother with.Similarly, I find it difficult to understand why any eleven-year-old of today would be sufficiently bored to turn inward for entertainment.
During the past few years, I have come to fear that the United Kingdom and China may be bookends on the most spectacular burst of development ever seen in human history. The carbon-fuelled, capital-driven model of economic growth, which started in my country 200-odd years ago, has spread across the planet and is now, I believe, reaching its apex here. We may well be blessed and cursed to be witnessing the era of “peak human” – at least in material terms. That is a huge and alarming prospect. It will require a complete readjustment of expectations. In future, I believe there will be greater tension globally between conservers and the exploiters. This may become the new dividing line in world politics. We are already seeing the rise of Green Parties, which are scoring record success (albeit often from a low base) in Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada. I’ve come to see the environment not as a subject, but as a prism. That is important to stress. Mostly the environment is treated as a subcategory and posted away to a certain pages in newspapers and on the websites. But it should not be a niche interest, it should be mainstream. The ecology is the basis for the economy, not the other way around.
Just like Amazon Web Services have enabled thousands of scaleable web startups and has made thousands of established companies more efficient, I predict that Amazon Publishing Services will enable thousands of new publishers and make thousands of established publishers more efficient. Amazon’s Editing Turk will connect thousands of writers to pools of editors who will work harder at a lower cost. Amazon Creative Services will provide illustrations and graphic design. Amazon Elastic Curation will match groups of consumers with new authors writing the books they want to read. And Amazon Creative Capital will help visionaries invest in promising projects and writers. Amazon will spend to achieve scale wherever scale drives economies, and everywhere else, Amazon will provide hypervisors to match talent with tasks.So the future of publishing will be dominated by publishers who take advantage of the various efficiencies of scale forged by Amazon (and Amazon competitors, we hope). The rest won’t be worth talking about, except as an expression of nostalgia. The efficiencies will have many unfortunate effects, which professors will write books about. But they won’t sell well. There are some things that even Amazon can’t do.
“Potato Head Blues” (1927). The song is great, the band is great, but there is nothing in 20th-century music better than Armstrong’s stop-time solo late in this song: stunning clarity of tone, absolutely mastery of phrasing, and unerring and uncanny movement around the beat. Sheer genius.
But the aspect that boomed out most loudly was his relentless pursuit of secular humanism in the face of ignorant religion. That came across even when his last doctor, Francis Collins, was speaking, addressing the memorial audience as a “follower of Jesus Christ”. Collins, head of the US National Institutes of Health, said Hitchens had helped forward the search for scientific answers to cancer by agreeing to try new therapies. Collins also revealed that, ironically, he had prayed for the great atheist in his final days.
Please explain: “ironically.”
What really motivates elementary particle physicists is a sense of how the world is ordered—it is, they believe, a world governed by simple universal principles that we are capable of discovering. But not everyone feels the importance of this. During the debate over the SSC, I was on the Larry King radio show with a congressman who opposed it. He said that he wasn’t against spending on science, but that we had to set priorities. I explained that the SSC was going to help us learn the laws of nature, and I asked if that didn’t deserve a high priority. I remember every word of his answer. It was “No.”What does motivate legislators is the immediate economic interests of their constituents. Big laboratories bring jobs and money into their neighborhood, so they attract the active support of legislators from that state, and apathy or hostility from many other members of Congress. Before the Texas site was chosen, a senator told me that at that time there were a hundred senators in favor of the SSC, but that once the site was chosen the number would drop to two. He wasn’t far wrong.