The Shattering Double Vision of V. S. Naipaul


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One of the great writers I truly admired. R.I.P.

Nominally, Naipaul is writing about Anand Biswas. Actually, he is writing about himself—Vidia in Oxford (“in a library grown suddenly dark”), and then in London (“in securer times of different stresses”). He is writing about the young man in South London, for whom memories of Trinidad are both painful and joyful, and about how the writing of his epic is at once the baring and the healing of a wound (“when the memories had lost the power to hurt”). How coolly and classically Naipaul refers to his own great achievement: “they would fall into place and give back the rest.” Now he is gone, but his book continues to give back the rest to us, again and again.

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James Wood – The New Yorker

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After Recessions, Why Do Some Jobs Disappear Forever?


Knowledge@Wharton: There are two things that I found quite interesting in your paper that I want to highlight for a minute. One is the finding that 88% of job losses in the so-called “routine” occupations — such as bank tellers, manufacturing plant jobs, and office clerks — happened during economic downturns, and this is a trend that has been going on since the mid-1980s. Interestingly, this was also around the same time when innovation and automation started to pick up. These two seem to be correlated. Are they?

Roussanov: This is exactly the main empirical fact that our model aims to explain or at least understand. We were not the ones who documented this fact, but this has become an important piece of information for macroeconomists to wrap our heads around — the fact that this job polarization process seems to be primarily happening during relatively short periods of time, which are recessions.

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Knowledge@Wharton

After Nearly 30 Years In Exile, This Kashmiri Singer Has A Hit Song Of The Summer


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“I used to sing in the open fields of Kashmir, with my neighbours,” Mir recalls by phone from Muzaffarabad, the city in northeast Pakistan where he now lives. Mir fondly recalls performing at school assemblies as a child, and at local wheat-sowing ceremonies in Kashmir. “But I was forced to run away from my homeland, when the situation deteriorated,” he says.

As a migrant in Pakistan, Mir had to give up singing, and began working as a textile embroiderer, making intricate Kashmiri needlework designs for clothes, tablecloths and curtains. (It’s still his primary job.) But after a few years in the country his love of singing was rekindled, when a Pakistani neighbor heard about Mir’s talent and hired him to sing at a family wedding. The job snowballed into more gigs and eventually leading to regular appearances on Radio Pakistan.

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FURKAN LATIF KHAN — NPR

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Here’s Why This Mama Merganser Has More Than 50 Ducklings


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A photographer in Minnesota recently captured an adorable shot of a Common Merganser followed by dozens of fuzzy babies.

Scientists aren’t sure exactly why ducks do this, but it could effectively serve as a reproductive insurance policy. If a raccoon invades a merganser nest and destroys all the eggs, the female still has more offspring being safely incubated in other nests. “One possibility would be, in a sense, not putting all their eggs in one basket,” Kaufman says.

This behavior doesn’t completely explain Cizek’s photograph, though, because there is a limit to how many eggs one duck can successfully incubate. Female ducks lay about a dozen eggs and can incubate as many as 20, says Kaufman. More than that, and the birds can’t keep all the eggs warm.

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Jillian Mock — Audobon

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Number of people sleeping in Hong Kong McDonald’s branches skyrockets


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Who are these McSleepers?

Saving on air conditioning costs, as well as comfort and security, topped a list of reasons given by these interviewees, followed by high rents, conflict with family members, the ability to develop social relations at the chain and substandard housing.

Other reasons included saving on transport costs and time to work, and seeking temporary shelter while waiting for low-rent public housing.

“Family is the basic unit in a society,” Tai Ping Shan publication commission chairwoman Jennifer Hung Sin-yu said. “Even one person who has a home but cannot return is too many. This phenomenon is worth our attention.”

Hung said the reasons given by interviewees showed that unaffordable housing had forced the poor into inferior living conditions such as subdivided flats, which subsequently drove them into McDonald’s for comfort and security.

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Shirley Zhao — South China Morning Post

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When Your Name Doesn’t Feel Like You


Do you feel your name is apt for you?

The explanation that the study authors offered for their results echoes Alter’s point: In most cases, a name is “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” explains co-author Yonat Zwebner, a marketing researcher at Wharton. “Your parents and society treat you according to the spirit of your name, and then you grow up and you fulfill those expectations, eventually even the way you look.” In the study, Zwebner and her colleagues attributed their “face-name matching effect” to both factors within the person’s control, like hairstyle, and factors created by life experience, like smile lines.

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Cari Romm — The Cut

Did Stephen King’s Son Just Solve a 44-Year-Old Murder Mystery?


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It wasn’t your typical jump-scare, no image of a hungry Great White Shark attacking a beachgoer. Instead, it was a scene in which a crowd boards a ferry on the Fourth of July, a seemingly innocuous moment in Steven Spielberg’s iconic masterpiece. In the shot, a female extra wearing a blue bandana over her auburn hair caught Hill’s attention. She was “almost a twin of the figure” in a forensic recreation image he recently saw of the Lady of the Dunes, the still-unidentified murder victim discovered in Provincetown in 1974—the very same year Jaws was filmed on nearby Martha’s Vineyard.

No, Rental Cars Aren’t About to Disappear


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That’s … less than stunning. It shows big changes in business-traveler behavior (and by extension in consumer behavior in general). But rental-car companies appear to still account for a 70 percent share of ground-transportation spending by Certify users, more than twice that of Uber and Lyft combined. Which makes sense: If you’re traveling to anywhere but a city center or other densely packed neighborhood in the U.S., renting a car for a few days is still usually more convenient than trying to get by on ride hailing, transit, walking or, well, scootering.

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Justin Fox — Bloomberg

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Searching for the ‘angel’ who held me on Westminster Bridge


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Sometimes you find your angel in the worst moments of your life. Goodness and evil always balance each other out.

“It’s amazing how our friendship came out of something so horrific and terrible,” Will says.

“We wouldn’t ordinarily have crossed paths. We’re different ages, have different professions and live and work in different areas.”

It’s a year later and he’s sitting with Cristina at the back of a busy brasserie in Soho. The sun is streaming through the windows and on the street outside office workers are mingling and sipping their first post-work pints.

Both have just come from work – Will, 25, from his job rejuvenating the area around Baker Street and Cristina, 34, from a meeting with an advertising firm. While Will grew up in London, Cristina moved to the city from Portugal 12 years ago.

It was an act of terror by Khalid Masood that brought them to the same place at the same time. On 22 March 2017, he drove a hired car into dozens of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed to death an unarmed police officer, before being shot and killed himself.

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Claire Bates — BBC

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Months After His Own Near-Death, Brian Bendis Knows What Hurts Superman


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Readers who pick up Superman get “a very large, cosmic story” that, in these initial issues, will see Earth establish itself in the fallout of the reveal of what actually happened to Krypton. “It will be revealed it was a cover-up, and the cover-up is always worse than the crime,” he says.

Action Comics, by contrast, is a crime saga set deep in Metropolis that follows a mafia that has operated under Superman’s nose for years. “It’s about Clark trying to tell the truth in a world that doesn’t agree with what the truth is.”

The complete article

Eric Francisco — Inverse

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