Happy Monday!
As I write this, I’m distracted by a news article telling me famed work-from-cafe practitioner and Epstein-island-frequenter Malcolm Gladwell is shedding tears about people not going into the office anymore. He apparently said “What has you reduced your life to?”.
I’m enjoying people telling him off on Twitter (check the quote-tweets).
From my home office to yours, let’s get started on our links this week, shall we?
I loved reading this long piece titled What Was The TED Talk? It goes back into some of the 2000s nostalgia of when we believed technology would solve all our problems. Ah those heady times, when as an enthusiastic engineering student in India I’d watch MIT OCW videos trying to decipher machine learning through my flickery internet connection. We believed putting lectures online would change the world. As the pandemic showed us, there's a good reason you weren’t able to complete those Coursera courses.
And similarly, TED Talks didn’t change the world. When they did, it was for the negative, with people feeling ideas had to be ‘inspiring’ and ‘interesting’ (inspiresting) to be backed.
As a tail-ender to this article, there’s this TED Talk by Sarah Silverman you’ve got to watch. This feels like the pinnacle of the TED bubble, because what are you thinking, bringing Sarah Silverman to talk at TED? Her comedy is about saying fuck you and your rules in the most empathetic way. And the crowd just played into her hands, giving her a standing ovation for saying the number 3000 looked like a poopy butt (amid other Sarah Silverman type comedy). Truly the best critique of TED. She was duly banned from TED and the TED talk was taken off the TED website.India House is at 72,000 words now. Plodding along. This week, I’m writing about the Alipore Bomb Case, which saw the first bomb factory being established in India. This blogpost I found covers the exciting, fun part, where they actually make, test and use bombs to assassinate the Governor of Bengal. The revelatory part to me was Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman who became a nun with the Ramakrishna Mission, was a mentor of JC Bose (who proved plants have life) while also being associated with the Anushilan Samiti revolutionaries. She actually convinced JC Bose to have Anushilan Samiti members apprentice in his lab, so they could become more familiar with how to make bombs. Wow.
Author and former Hollywood assistant Isabel Kaplan has a novel out about being an assistant in pre-MeToo Hollywood. She has a piece on here about how MeToo has changed Hollywood (it hasn’t). The most interesting thing to me about this piece was this predicament she brought up - if now Hollywood wants to make a movie based on her novel, would she actually stand for her principles and refuse to work with the people she knew to be creeps? She’s not sure.
My writing group TL;DR Press has a short story anthology out again! This one is called Mosaic. We conduct a flash fiction contest every year, which is our annual fundraiser, and this year’s winners are published in this anthology. It promises to be an exciting and quick read that will leave you wanting more. As a charity publisher, the proceeds of this book will go towards Doorstop Library, a charity focused on literacy and reading for disadvantaged youth.
Artefact of the week: Panther-ended Rhyton from the Parthian Empire. (source).
I didn’t know these things were called a Rhyton. So you fill it with wine, unscrew the panther off (look at the grapevines on it!), and drink from the bottom. Why? Make it make sense!