How to Write: Listen to Your Animal Impulses. A Lesson from Joshua Cohen

source: Big Think    2016年5月27日
What's the best advice novelist Joshua Cohen has for aspiring writers? It's not to kill your darlings but kill your distractions. And get in touch with your deepest animal impulses. Cohen's latest novel is Book of Numbers (http://goo.gl/hrSpZe).

Transcript - The best way to start writing is to stop watching videos. The second one is maybe to stop being in videos. Yep, but I also – but that’s a joke but as Freud said there are no jokes. There is no substitute for uninterrupted time for the, you know, not the killing your darlings thing of killing your favorite lines but killing your distractions first. And then hearing yourself talk honestly and hearing the way in which – or for me at least hearing the way that ideas are framed in speech give me a sense of how they might be framed on the page. Even if people feel like they’re not fluent on the page or on the screen or on the screen that we still call a page. They probably speak with less um’s and ah’s and oh’s than I do sometimes. And but primarily I think that the real question is what are you writing for. And I don’t mean knowing your audience because you can never know your audience. And if you actually want to write well your goal should be that your audience is inconceivable to you.

So what I mean is know what you’re trying to find of yourself from what you’re writing. I think most people are stuck because they are either trying to find another person in what they’re writing or they’re not even sure what they are – they’re not even sure why they are hurting themselves so badly. You know writing is a very strange thing because it is – it’s not the messy thing that you give to children in kindergarten like paints where you can smear it everywhere. Or like when they give a bunch of kindergarteners xylophones and they drive everyone crazy, right. Because it requires a little bit more education, right, to make the same amount of noise let’s say. But writing then becomes the most basic way besides speech of communication. And people do it very easily, right. But then it also becomes the hardest thing to do. And I actually tend to think about it like when I go to the zoo which honestly has probably been twice in the last ten years. But when you go to the zoo and you watch animals fuck. Can you say that on this? You can watch them have sex and you’re like oh, that’s easy.

Now there are obviously different rules in the animal kingdom, or none. But it’s thinking like oh, if only it were so simple, right. And I think that getting in touch with some of those honestly instincts that are animal inside of us like rage, resentment, the strength that comes from fear will always again make good writing and life bad.

If I knew who or what my audience is, was, will be then I’m not writing, I’m calculating which is a, which I mean in the way we kind of use the word calculating. But also meaning that kind of good old American confidence man huckster sense, you know. I’m reckoning up intended effects, interpretations. I’m weighing what people are going to read in certain ways as irony, as offensive, as anodyne, as prurient, as “honest” right. And first of all there’s the, there’s just the fact that all of these ideals are normative within generations, you know, and change, right. So we already know that all of these things that I’m sort of calculating to are going to be utterly upended by a younger generation that’s going to consider me old and passé and worthless. There is though the hope that if you write with a certain openness to moods and states of mind that make you feel uncomfortable those might be portents of future inconceivable moods which then would really be understood by future inconceivable audiences.

Branko Milanovic: Recent Trends in Global Income Distribution and their Political Implications

source: Yale University     2016年4月25日
Yale University’s Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics is pleased to announce Branko Milanovic, Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, who delivered this year’s Robert H. Litowitz Lecture in Ethics and Public Policy. The talk discussed the most recent evolution in global inequality, the new 2011 PPP numbers and focused on the political implications of the important changes that are taking place in global distribution of income. In particular, it focused on the rise of the middle class in Asia, income stagnation of the rich countries’ middle classes, and the emergence of global plutocracy.
Branko Milanovic is Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center City University of New York and Senior Fellow at Luxembourg Income Study; was lead economist in World Bank Research Department for almost 20 years and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Professor Milanovic’s main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, as well as historically, among pre-industrial societies.
His new book Global Inequality: a New Approach for the Age of Globalization deals with economic and political issues of globalization, including the redefinition of the "Kuznets cycles," and is to be published in April 2016.

CEAS at Yale Presents the 17th Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies

source: Yale University    2016年4月26日
Dismantling Developmentalism: Japan’s Political and Economic Struggles after Achieving Success by T.J. Pempel, UC Berkeley

Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature

source: Yale University     2014年1月15日
Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He delivers the the inaugural Franke Program in Science and the Humanities Lecture entitled, "The Better Angels of Our Nature".

In Conversation with Hilary Benn about Britain and Europe

source: London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) 2016年3月18日
Date: Thursday 17 March 2016
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Hilary Benn
Chair: Professor Tony Travers

Hilary Benn (@hilarybennmp) is the Labour Member of Parliament for Leeds Central and the Shadow Foreign Secretary. Previously, he served as International Development Secretary, as a Minister in the Home Office, as Secretary of State at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as the Shadow Leader of the House of Commons and the Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.
Tony Travers is Director of LSE London, a research centre at the London School of Economics.
British Government @ LSE (@lsegovernment) is an initiative currently based in the Government Department to promote and develop research on British Government being conducted at the LSE. So far world class speakers have attended our events, talking on a range of topics.

Why There is "Something" rather than "Nothing" (Closer to Truth)

# automatic playing for the 3 videos (click the up-left corner for the list)

source: Closer To Truth       2016年5月16日
We know that there is not Nothing. There is Something. It is not the case that there is no world, nothing at all, a blank. It is the case that there is a world. Nothing did not obtain. But why?

Max Tegmark - Why There is "Something" rather than "Nothing" 5:56
Sean Carroll - Why There is "Something" rather than "Nothing" 6:57
Anthony Aguirre - Why There is "Something" rather than "Nothing" 4:25

How Entrepreneurs Made Britain with Liam Byrne

source: The RSA    2016年6月12日
How Entrepreneurs Made Britain: Liam Byrne explains how Britain was built by some of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs in history. But who will shape its future? Liam Byrne asks 'Is Britain still one of the world’s great enterprise powers' - and if not what needs to change?

Watch Liam Byrne MP, author of Dragons: Ten Entrepreneurs Who Built Britain, in our latest RSA Spotlight - the edits which take you straight to the heart of the event! Loved this snippet? Watch the full replay:https://youtu.be/301wvBdo4BI