The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Desolation Row
by Bob Dylan
They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row (more…)
Checklists provide an effective method for avoiding error. They trigger the right action by the right person at the right time. Effective checklists activate the specialized knowledge most applicable at a particular point in time, and optimize communication between different sets of specialists. In this way, checklists help avoid one of the principal challenges of modern organizations: the ‘silent disengagement’ that results when specialists only keep their narrow tasks in mind instead of focusing on broader team or organizational outcomes.
In advocating for the checklist, Gawande is not minimizing the importance of human discretion. On the contrary: in conditions of uncertainty – when a surgeon is operating on a patient, or a building is being constructed, or a venture capitalist is picking an entrepreneur to back – human judgment is vital. The goal of the checklist is not to eliminate discretion but to help ensure the optimal mix of procedure and discretion. Gawande notes that good checklists help balance competing principles: freedom and discipline, craft and protocol, specialized ability and group collaboration.
I’m a great believer in checklists. I have notebooks full of checklists. Just writing the daily to-do list makes me feel like I’ve already accomplished something.
Girl On The Train tries so hard to out-Gone Girl Gone Girl, it derails itself. Incoherent, irritating, suspense-free and a waste of Emily Blunt and Rebecca Ferguson.
Like most recent Woody Allen, Cafe Society is a retread of peak Woody Allen—in this case Crimes and Misdemeanors—but if you need cheering up you could do worse. Bonus question: Do all the protagonists of Woody Allen movies do a Woody Allen impression? Even Cate Blanchett was doing his speech patterns in Blue Jasmine.
What would be great: Emily Blunt in a Woody Allen movie.
Workers at the Temmler factory in Berlin produced 35m tablets of Pervitin for the German army and Luftwaffe in 1940. Photograph: Temmler Pharma GmbH & Co KG, Marburg
The story Ohler tells begins in the days of the Weimar Republic, when Germany’s pharmaceutical industry was thriving – the country was a leading exporter both of opiates, such as morphine, and of cocaine – and drugs were available on every street corner. It was during this period that Hitler’s inner circle established an image of him as an unassailable figure who was willing to work tirelessly on behalf of his country, and who would permit no toxins – not even coffee – to enter his body.
“He is all genius and body,” reported one of his allies in 1930. “And he mortifies that body in a way that would shock people like us! He doesn’t drink, he practically only eats vegetables, and he doesn’t touch women.” No wonder that when the Nazis seized power in 1933, “seductive poisons” were immediately outlawed. In the years that followed, drug users would be deemed “criminally insane”; some would be killed by the state using a lethal injection; others would be sent to concentration camps. Drug use also began to be associated with Jews. The Nazi party’s office of racial purity claimed that the Jewish character was essentially drug-dependent. Both needed to be eradicated from Germany.
Some drugs, however, had their uses, particularly in a society hell bent on keeping up with the energetic Hitler (“Germany awake!” the Nazis ordered, and the nation had no choice but to snap to attention). A substance that could “integrate shirkers, malingerers, defeatists and whiners” into the labour market might even be sanctioned.
Read Tom Wolfe’s Reflections on Language. It’s long, but worth your time. Haay mahirap talagang magmarunong kung kayabangan lang ang puhunan mo.
A Gentleman in Moscow is available at National Bookstores, Php755. Did you know that National Bookstore delivers? Go to nationalbookstore.com for details.
I try not to go out on Fridays when the traffic is even more horrible than usual (You didn’t think this was possible, but it is!). So Friday is Hole Up With A Good Book Day, and today I’m reading A Gentleman In Moscow. The first chapters are delightful, considering that the hero Count Rostov has just been found guilty by a Bolshevik tribunal of being an unrepentant member of the corrupt leisure class.
Ordinarily he would be taken out and shot, but since he is considered a prerevolutionary hero he is placed under house arrest at a Moscow hotel. Not in his suite, but in a utility room in the attic. If he ventures out of the hotel, he will be shot. How will this sophisticated aristocrat endure the confinement? True, it is easier to deal with boredom than constant beatings, deprivation, and threats to his life, but he left all his favorite books at his estate.
A Gentleman In Moscow reminds me of the Garbo movie Ninotchka by Ernst Lubitsch–witty, frothy, lightness concealing social commentary. And of The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson in its combination of whimsy and melancholy (It makes us nostalgic for an era we never actually lived in). Exactly what I need at the end of a verklempt week.
Did anyone read Towles’s previous novel Rules of Civility? I bought a copy but I gave it away in a contest.
Eyeglasses by Maria Nella Sarabia, O.D.
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