In ‘Bandersnatch,’ Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Meets ‘Black Mirror’ Fatalism

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Just finished watching this. Great concept. And that’s why today’s needull is on Bandersnatch.

Besides the frustratingly grating message, “Bandersnatch” does have its better moments. One of the more complicated endings involves Stefan going back in time, and allowing his child-self to die with his mother in a train crash. In the present day, Stefan dies quietly in his chair, and it’s clear that he’s achieved some sort of peace or resolution from the past trauma, even though it’s one that leaves his father distraught, and perhaps, the player uncomfortable with the events unfolding in front of them. The scene is one of “Black Mirror”’s best for this reason: There is no clear-cut answer of right or wrong when it comes to this choice, making its unresolved question all the more thoughtful.

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Grace Z. Li — The Harvard Crimson

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The world’s most unproductive entrepreneur

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Over the next few years, Low and his conspirators would use 1MDB to borrow billions of dollars from global capital markets, and would simply take much of the proceeds for themselves. To achieve all this required Low to do constant networking, set up immensely complicated financial and legal arrangements, and splash out tens of millions of dollars along the way to win friends and influence people. Low in fact worked hard at his corruption, and displayed unmistakable entrepreneurial flair–a huge amount of effort deployed to make his country poorer not richer.

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Andrew Batson’s Blog

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Why can’t we feel Earth’s spin?

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A simple question.

Earth spins on its axis once in every 24-hour day. At Earth’s equator, the speed of Earth’s spin is about 1,000 miles per hour (1,600 km per hour). The day-night has carried you around in a grand circle under the stars every day of your life, and yet you don’t feel Earth spinning. Why not? It’s because you and everything else – including Earth’s oceans and atmosphere – are spinning along with the Earth at the same constant speed.

It’s only if Earth stopped spinning, suddenly, that we’d feel it. Then it would be a feeling similar to riding along in a fast car, and having someone slam on the brakes!

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EarthSky

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The ghosts of Mrs Gandhi: Amitav Ghosh looks back at the 1984 massacre of Sikhs

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Happy New Year to all! At the beginning of the year, we remember the not so good part of history so that we learn not to repeat it.

Writers don’t join crowds – Naipaul and so many others teach us that. But what do you do when the Constitutional authority fails to act? You join and in joining bear all the responsibility and obligations and guilt that joining represents. My experience of the violence was overwhelming and memorable of the resistance to it. When I think of the women staring down the mob, I am not filled with writerly wonder. I am reminded of my gratitude from being saved from injury. What I saw at firsthand – and not merely on that march but on the bus, in Hari’s house, in the huge compound filled with essential goods – was not the horror of violence but the affirmation of humanity: in each case, I witnessed the risks that perfectly ordinary people were willing to take for one another.

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Amitav Ghosh — Scroll

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What can we learn from people who succeed later in life?

Late bloomers.

The key to long-term success from a creator’s perspective is straightforward: let the qualities that give you your Q-factor do their job by giving them a chance to deliver success over and over. In other words, successful people engage in project after project after project. They don’t just count their winnings; they buy more lottery tickets. They keep producing. Take writer J.K. Rowling, who followed Harry Potter by creating a successful mystery series (under the name Robert Galbraith). Each time she publishes a new book, her new fans go back and read the older volumes as well. Each new book, then, breathes life into her career, keeping her whole body of work present and relevant.

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Albert-Laszlo Barabasi — TED

Naked and Afraid

Another one on Facebook, hopefully last for this year.

Admit you have a problem. Yes, over and over and over, Facebook executives have copped a plea. But they’ve never acknowledged the real problem is the company’s core DNA. More often than not, the company plays the pre-teen game of admitting a small sin so as to cover a larger one. The latest case in point is this post-modern gem: Elliot Schrage On Definers. The headline alone says all you need to know about Facebook’s latest disaster: Blame the guy who hired the firm, have him fall on a sword, add a bit of Sandbergian mea culpa, and move along. Nope, this time is different, Facebook. It’s time for fundamental change. And that means….

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John Battelle — New Co Shift

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Things only adults notice in A Christmas Story

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Merry Christmas!!

Ralphie’s father, only ever referred to as The Old Man (Darren McGavin) is a typical representation of a Midwestern father figure in the early 20th century. He’s stern but not cruel, caring but not affectionate, and distant but not absent. He’s a man’s man, and he spends most of the film just trying to read his newspaper and enjoy a little bit of turkey while his sons get into trouble around him. If you look close enough, though, there are little hints of eccentricity in The Old Man’s life. He insists on being timed when he changes a tire, for example, and went through the trouble of burying his “major award” in the backyard and supposedly playing “Taps” in tribute to it as he did. He even takes some time in the department store to skip along with the Wizard of Oz characters. Ralphie doesn’t think much about it, but there’s more to his Old Man than newspapers and furnace battles. He has a rich inner life that we only see glimpses of.

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Matthew Jackson — Looper

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FINANCIAL MARKETS WERE NOT DESIGNED TO MANAGE THE PLANET

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Take the case of a farmer who is trying to decide on an investment strategy for the future of his farm: should he be planting new fruit trees, purchasing new equipment, increasing (or decreasing) his livestock, or investing in new buildings? Recall, now, that our hypothetical farmer gets his grain from wholesalers who themselves bought it at prices set on financial markets, and it becomes all too clear that excessive uncertainty surrounding the price of grain will leave him unable or unwilling to experiment with new strategies. The industrialist on whom Hayek based his own reasoning is likely to suffer from a similar paralysis.

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Nicolas Bouleau — Public Books

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Modern Slavery

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Slavery still exists.

India abolished its caste and bonded labor systems decades ago, but social stratification remains pervasive. Families remain enslaved for generations, working in dangerous conditions without the means to pay for their freedom. India’s bonded labor system disproportionately ensnares Dalits, the bottom class of the Hindu caste system, as well as tribal communities and religious minorities. The cycle often begins with a loan request made to a landlord or business owner for expenses incurred burying a family member, treating an illness, procuring employment, or staging a wedding. The loan provider can then strongarm laborers or threaten to take away their family’s shelter to extract more work than the value of the original loan. This can result in a family accruing debt over generations. Brick kilns, rice mills, farms, and embroidery factories are notorious hubs of debt-extorted labor.

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Council on Foreign Relations

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Johnson & Johnson Knew Their Baby Powder Contained Asbestos for Decades

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This is a sad one.

J&J’s effort to protect its iconic Baby Powder franchise by shaping research was led by physician and scientist executives. An early 1970s study of 1,992 Italian talc miners shows how it worked: J&J commissioned and paid for the study, told the researchers the results it wanted, and hired a ghostwriter to redraft the article that presented the findings in a journal.

The effort entailed other attempts to influence research, including a U.S. government study of the health of talc workers in Vermont. J&J’s Windsor Minerals Inc subsidiary, one of several mine operators involved in the study, developed a relationship with the U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health researchers to “even influence the conclusions” through suggestions of “subjective interpretations,” according to a 1973 Windsor Minerals memo.

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Lisa Girion — Reuters

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