via Beyond Geopolitics > World Economic Forum Annual Meeting | World Economic Forum
Day: January 26, 2020
Did you know…
Did you know…
… that today is the birthday of Lobster Thermidor? In 1894, Lobster Thermidor was created by Marie’s, a Paris restaurant near the theatre Comedie Francaise, to honor the opening of the play Thermidor by Victorien Sardou. Lobster Thermidor is a French dish consisting of a creamy mixture of cooked lobster meat, egg yolks, and cognac or brandy, stuffed into a lobster shell, and optionally served with an oven-browned cheese crust, typically Gruyere.
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Today’s Inspirational Quote:
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more of it I have.”
— Thomas Jefferson
SL009: Opening Keynote Speakers vs Closing Keynote Speakers – SpeakersU
#wef20 – 6 A’s DhAnAnjAyA jAy PArkhe© Daily
Sharks Are Evolving to Walk on Land
Priti Krishtel: Why are drug prices so high? Investigating the outdated US patent system | TED Talk
Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability | TED Talk
Marilyn Waring: The unpaid work that GDP ignores — and why it really counts | TED Talk
Chrystia Freeland: The rise of the new global super-rich | TED Talk
via Chrystia Freeland: The rise of the new global super-rich | TED Talk
Technology is advancing in leaps and bounds — and so is economic inequality, says writer Chrystia Freeland. In an impassioned talk, she charts the rise of a new class of plutocrats (those who are extremely powerful because they are extremely wealthy), and suggests that globalization and new technology are actually fueling, rather than closing, the global income gap. Freeland lays out three problems with plutocracy … and one glimmer of hope.
Lessons from Leaders | Case studies | Partner with TED | About | TED
France: French anti-corruption agency running checks on Renault
via France: French anti-corruption agency running checks on Renault
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Gender is dead, long live gender: just what is ‘performativity’? | Aeon Ideas
The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious | Aeon Essays
WORD OF THE DAY
WORD OF THE DAY |
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Examples of Parasynonym in a sentence
“When learning a foreign language it can be easy to get confused by a parasynonym.” “For his thesis he wrote a paper describing the linguistic function of the parasynonym.” |
Can US Presidents Start Wars? – HISTORY
6 A’s DhAnAnjAyA jAy PArkhe© Daily
My fav Newsletters – Nik’s Awesome Summaries.
Heyo, it’s Nik with 7 more awesome summaries!
By the way, if you’re looking to get more out of everything you read, whether it’s our free summaries, articles online, or full books, consider our reading guide.
It’s a beautiful, 20-page PDF that explains the science of how to remember more, better, and longer from reading. Great way to support us too! You can learn more about it here.
Alright, let’s take a look at this week’s life-changing books!
A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger
1-Sentence-Summary: A More Beautiful Question will teach you how to ask more and better questions, showing you the power that the right questions have to transform your life for the better.
- Asking questions makes us more creative and intelligent, but school takes this away from us at a young age.
- Questioning “why?” is good, but when you ask “why not?” you open hidden doors and find solutions to your problems.
- “What if?” questions help you combine ideas to form better ones, and wondering “how?” helps you start acting on them.
If you want to discover new opportunities and ways to make your life better, this book is for you
A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson
1-Sentence-Summary: A Return To Love will help you let go of resentment, fear, and anger to have happier and healthier jobs and relationships by teaching you how to embrace the power of love.
- Whatever you think is causing your unhappiness, it always comes back to a root feeling of fear.
- Let a higher power guide your career path to have a more enjoyable time at work and make a difference in the world too.
- People who are grumpy are most likely only trying to shield themselves from the pain of trauma, and they just need some love.
If you want to rise above the hatred that is so prevalent in our world today, this book is for you.
60 Seconds & You’re Hired! by Robin Ryan
1-Sentence-Summary: 60 Seconds & You’re Hired! is a guide to getting your dream job that will help you feel confident in your next interview by teaching you how to impress your interviewer with being concise, focusing on your strengths, and knowing what to do at every step of the process.
- Constantly refer to your top 5 skills throughout the interview to help your interviewer remember what makes you a good fit.
- Preparing beforehand will eliminate your fear and help you be as confident as possible when answering each question.
- Take advantage of the golden opportunity to reveal your true character that interviewer gives you when they ask if you have any questions.
If you want to become an expert at job interviews and land your dream job, this book book is for you.
What other books did we summarize this week?
23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang will help you think more clearly about our current economic state by uncovering the hidden consequences of free market capitalism and offering solutions that could give us all a more fair world.
A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss will enlarge your knowledge of our expanding universe by showing you how it began, what we’re learning about it now, and what will happen to it in the future.
A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage will give you some great conversation starters at your next party by teaching you the origins and impact of the worlds six favorite drinks, including beer, wine, alcoholic spirits, tea, coffee, and soda.
Call Sign Chaos by Jim Mattis is a review of US foreign policy through the eyes of General Jim Mattis, who led forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That’s everything for this week!
Happy reading,
My fav newsletter
Calculating the Incalculable: Thoreau on the True Value of a TreeMore than two years after a fire started by a teenage boy destroyed 47,000 acres of old-growth forest in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge, having just resolved to face the new year like a tree, I found myself on the brink of tears before the blackened trunk of an ancient ponderosa pine as I walked the sylvan scar tissue of the tragedy. A conversation with my hiking companion — a dear friend currently working with the Navajo Nation on preserving and learning from their own ecological inheritance — led to the impossible question of how we can even begin to measure the loss: What is a tree worth? Not its timber, not its carbon offset value, but its treeness — the source of the existential wisdom Whitman celebrated, the mirror Blake believed it holds up to a person’s character, its silent teachings about how to love and how to live and what optimism really means. The teenager who decimated this green tapestry of belonging was ordered to pay $36.6 million in restitution — a number that staggers at first, but only until one considers the nearly 4,000,000 leaved and rooted victims of the crime, and the many more millions of creatures for whom the forest was home, and even the occasional insignificant human animals who, like my friend and I, bathed in these ancient trees to wash away the sorrows of living. The contemplation of this impossible question called to mind a fragment from the diaries of Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) — he who saw nature as a form of prayer, who once mourned a tree like one mourns a friend, and who asked: “What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?” Stone pine by Rebecca Hey from the world’s first tree encyclopedia. Available as a print. Noting the disappearance of Maine’s white pines, Thoreau laments how these majestic trees, each endowed with a living spirit as immortal as his own, are vanishing because the men who cut them down for lumber have failed to see their true value. In a passage included in the altogether revitalizing Thoreau and the Language of Trees (public library), he writes:
Art from Trees at Night — Art Young’s tree silhouettes from the 1920s. Available as a print Thoreau cherished trees not only in the forest but also in the city. In a journal entry penned at the vibrant height of autumn and included in the indispensable Excursions (free ebook | public library) — the volume that gave us Thoreau on finding inner warmth in the cold season — he considers the democratizing value of the maples hemming his local Main Street:
Common maple by Rebecca Hey from the world’s first tree encyclopedia. Available as a print. Complement with philosopher Martin Buber on what trees teach us about seeing one another and the emboldening illustrated story of Wangari Maathai’s movement to plant trees as resistance and empowerment, which made her the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, then revisit Thoreau on the long cycles of social change and the difference between an artisan, an artist, and a genius.
My Mother’s Eyes: A Soulful Animated Short Film About Loss and the Unbreakable Bonds of LoveKepler may not have revolutionized our understanding of the universe had his illiterate mother not ignited his love of astronomy by taking him to see a comet as a six-year-old boy in 1536. “Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman,” the trailblazing psychologist Donald Winnicott observed four centuries later in his landmark manifesto for motherhood. That debt is perhaps the tenderest, strongest, most complex thread on the enchanted loom of existence. Animator, illustrator, and director Jenny Wright was midway through her university studies at Central Saint Martin’s College in London when her mother died. In consonance with Borges’s insistence that “all that happens to us… is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art,” she transmuted her grief — that slippery, noxious, all-pervading mercury of sorrow which words can never fully hold — into a soulful animated short film titled “My Mother’s Eyes,” which became her graduation thesis. Simple, tenderly expressive line drawings unspool a complex, inexpressible universe of feeling as this deeply personal memorial unlatches the floodgates to a universal human emotion. Complement with some beautiful advice to a daughter from pioneering political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who died birthing her own daughter, then revisit poet Meghan O’Rourke’s sensitive and trenchant meditation on how to live with loss, composed after her mother’s death.
The Haunting Beauty of Snowflakes: Wilson Bentley’s Pioneering 19th-Century Photomicroscopy of Snow CrystalsHardly any scientific finding has permeated popular culture more profoundly, transmuted its truth into a more pervasive cliché, or inspired more uninspired college application essays than the fact that no two snowflakes are alike. But for the vast majority of human history, the uniqueness of snowflakes was far from an established fact. In the early seventeenth century, while revolutionizing science with the celestial mechanics of the macro scale that would land his mother in a witchcraft trial, Johannes Kepler turned his inquisitive imagination to the micro scale with a rather unusual Christmas present he made for a friend — a booklet titled The Six-Cornered Snowflake, exploring in a playful and poetic way the science of why snowflakes have six sides. When one landed on his sleeve in the bitter Prague winter, Kepler found himself wondering why snowflakes “always come down with six corners and with six radii tufted like feathers” — and not, say, with five or seven. Centuries before the advent of crystallography, the visionary astronomer became the first to invite science into this ancient dwelling place of beauty and to ask, essentially, why snowflakes are the way they are. But it would be another two centuries before this intersection of science and splendor enraptures the popular imagination with the nexus of truth and beauty in the form of ice crystals — a task that would fall on a teenage farm-boy in Vermont. Wilson Bentley (February 9, 1865–December 23, 1931) was fifteen when his mother, aware of her son’s sensitive curiosity and artistic bent, strained the family’s means to give him a microscope for his birthday. Over the next four years, while Walt Whitman was exulting a state over that “a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Wilson placed every curio he could find under his microscope: blades of grass, pebbles, insects. The day he managed to place a snowflake on the glass plate and to savor its microscopic perfection before it melted, he was besotted. Snowflakes became his life. “Miracles of beauty,” he called them. He began sketching what he saw through his microscope, but felt that his drawings failed to capture the full miraculousness before it vanished into liquid erasure. Although his father was already irate with the boy’s artistic deviation from farm labor, “fussing with snowflakes” rather than pulling potatoes, Wilson somehow persuaded him to invest in a camera. Weeks before his twentieth birthday, he mounted his new 1.5-inch microscope eyepiece to the lens of his enormous view camera with its accordion-like body fully extended. On January 15, 1880, Wilson Bentley took his first photograph of a snowflake. Mesmerized by the beauty of the result, he transported his equipment to the unheated wooden shed behind the farmhouse and began recording his work in two separate sets of notebooks — one filled with sketches and dedicated to refining his artistic photomicroscopy; the other filled with weather data, carefully monitoring the conditions under which various snowflakes were captured. For forty-six winters to come, this slender quiet boy, enchanted by the wonders of nature and attentive to its minutest manifestations, would hold his breath over the microscope-camera station and take more than 5,000 photographs of snow crystals — each a vanishing masterpiece with the delicacy of a flower and the mathematical precision of a honeycomb, a ghost of perfection melting onto the glass plate within seconds, a sublime metaphor for the ecstasy and impermanence of beauty, of life itself. A generation after the invention of photography recalibrated our relationship to impermanence, Wilson Bentley devoted his life to popularizing the uniqueness of snowflakes and helping others appreciate the ephemeral “masterpiece of design” that each snowflake is, its singular and fleeting existence never to be replicated, its beauty gone “without leaving any record behind.” Wilson Bentley at work In his later years, he reflected on the adolescent passion that would become his life’s work:
And so he did. Wilson Bentley, who comes alive in Duncan Blanchard’s wonderful 1998 biography The Snowflake Man (public library), grew famous as Snowflake Bentley, establishing himself as the world’s first snowflake photographer and enrapturing vast audiences with nature’s masterworks of ephemeral perfection. Half a century after he first grew enchanted with the photomicroscopy of snowflakes, in a 1922 article for Popular Mechanics, Bentley extolled the rewards of this art purchased by physical hardship in below-freezing temperatures:
Months before his death, his life’s work was finally published under the title Snow Crystals — a scrumptious monograph of 2,500 of his most beguiling photographs, which remains in print today as Snowflakes in Photographs (public library). Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s haunting photomicroscopy of tears cried under various emotions and these gorgeous vintage illustrations of scientific process and phenomena — including an early diagram of snowflake geometries — from a French physics textbook predating the widespread application of photography, then revisit the story of how, a generation before Bentley, the young photographer John Adams Whipple changed our relationship to impermanence with his pioneering astrophotography.
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My fav newsletter
Calculating the Incalculable: Thoreau on the True Value of a Tree![]() More than two years after a fire started by a teenage boy destroyed 47,000 acres of old-growth forest in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge, having just resolved to face the new year like a tree, I found myself on the brink of tears before the blackened trunk of an ancient ponderosa pine as I walked the sylvan scar tissue of the tragedy. A conversation with my hiking companion — a dear friend currently working with the Navajo Nation on preserving and learning from their own ecological inheritance — led to the impossible question of how we can even begin to measure the loss: What is a tree worth? Not its timber, not its carbon offset value, but its treeness — the source of the existential wisdom Whitman celebrated, the mirror Blake believed it holds up to a person’s character, its silent teachings about how to love and how to live and what optimism really means. The teenager who decimated this green tapestry of belonging was ordered to pay $36.6 million in restitution — a number that staggers at first, but only until one considers the nearly 4,000,000 leaved and rooted victims of the crime, and the many more millions of creatures for whom the forest was home, and even the occasional insignificant human animals who, like my friend and I, bathed in these ancient trees to wash away the sorrows of living. The contemplation of this impossible question called to mind a fragment from the diaries of Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) — he who saw nature as a form of prayer, who once mourned a tree like one mourns a friend, and who asked: “What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?” Stone pine by Rebecca Hey from the world’s first tree encyclopedia. Available as a print. Noting the disappearance of Maine’s white pines, Thoreau laments how these majestic trees, each endowed with a living spirit as immortal as his own, are vanishing because the men who cut them down for lumber have failed to see their true value. In a passage included in the altogether revitalizing Thoreau and the Language of Trees (public library), he writes:
Art from Trees at Night — Art Young’s tree silhouettes from the 1920s. Available as a print Thoreau cherished trees not only in the forest but also in the city. In a journal entry penned at the vibrant height of autumn and included in the indispensable Excursions (free ebook | public library) — the volume that gave us Thoreau on finding inner warmth in the cold season — he considers the democratizing value of the maples hemming his local Main Street:
Common maple by Rebecca Hey from the world’s first tree encyclopedia. Available as a print. Complement with philosopher Martin Buber on what trees teach us about seeing one another and the emboldening illustrated story of Wangari Maathai’s movement to plant trees as resistance and empowerment, which made her the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, then revisit Thoreau on the long cycles of social change and the difference between an artisan, an artist, and a genius.
My Mother’s Eyes: A Soulful Animated Short Film About Loss and the Unbreakable Bonds of Love
Kepler may not have revolutionized our understanding of the universe had his illiterate mother not ignited his love of astronomy by taking him to see a comet as a six-year-old boy in 1536. “Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman,” the trailblazing psychologist Donald Winnicott observed four centuries later in his landmark manifesto for motherhood. That debt is perhaps the tenderest, strongest, most complex thread on the enchanted loom of existence.
Animator, illustrator, and director Jenny Wright was midway through her university studies at Central Saint Martin’s College in London when her mother died. In consonance with Borges’s insistence that “all that happens to us… is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art,” she transmuted her grief — that slippery, noxious, all-pervading mercury of sorrow which words can never fully hold — into a soulful animated short film titled “My Mother’s Eyes,” which became her graduation thesis. Simple, tenderly expressive line drawings unspool a complex, inexpressible universe of feeling as this deeply personal memorial unlatches the floodgates to a universal human emotion. Complement with some beautiful advice to a daughter from pioneering political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who died birthing her own daughter, then revisit poet Meghan O’Rourke’s sensitive and trenchant meditation on how to live with loss, composed after her mother’s death.
The Haunting Beauty of Snowflakes: Wilson Bentley’s Pioneering 19th-Century Photomicroscopy of Snow Crystals![]() Hardly any scientific finding has permeated popular culture more profoundly, transmuted its truth into a more pervasive cliché, or inspired more uninspired college application essays than the fact that no two snowflakes are alike. But for the vast majority of human history, the uniqueness of snowflakes was far from an established fact. In the early seventeenth century, while revolutionizing science with the celestial mechanics of the macro scale that would land his mother in a witchcraft trial, Johannes Kepler turned his inquisitive imagination to the micro scale with a rather unusual Christmas present he made for a friend — a booklet titled The Six-Cornered Snowflake, exploring in a playful and poetic way the science of why snowflakes have six sides. When one landed on his sleeve in the bitter Prague winter, Kepler found himself wondering why snowflakes “always come down with six corners and with six radii tufted like feathers” — and not, say, with five or seven. Centuries before the advent of crystallography, the visionary astronomer became the first to invite science into this ancient dwelling place of beauty and to ask, essentially, why snowflakes are the way they are. But it would be another two centuries before this intersection of science and splendor enraptures the popular imagination with the nexus of truth and beauty in the form of ice crystals — a task that would fall on a teenage farm-boy in Vermont. Wilson Bentley (February 9, 1865–December 23, 1931) was fifteen when his mother, aware of her son’s sensitive curiosity and artistic bent, strained the family’s means to give him a microscope for his birthday. Over the next four years, while Walt Whitman was exulting a state over that “a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Wilson placed every curio he could find under his microscope: blades of grass, pebbles, insects. The day he managed to place a snowflake on the glass plate and to savor its microscopic perfection before it melted, he was besotted. Snowflakes became his life. “Miracles of beauty,” he called them. He began sketching what he saw through his microscope, but felt that his drawings failed to capture the full miraculousness before it vanished into liquid erasure. Although his father was already irate with the boy’s artistic deviation from farm labor, “fussing with snowflakes” rather than pulling potatoes, Wilson somehow persuaded him to invest in a camera. Weeks before his twentieth birthday, he mounted his new 1.5-inch microscope eyepiece to the lens of his enormous view camera with its accordion-like body fully extended. On January 15, 1880, Wilson Bentley took his first photograph of a snowflake. Mesmerized by the beauty of the result, he transported his equipment to the unheated wooden shed behind the farmhouse and began recording his work in two separate sets of notebooks — one filled with sketches and dedicated to refining his artistic photomicroscopy; the other filled with weather data, carefully monitoring the conditions under which various snowflakes were captured. For forty-six winters to come, this slender quiet boy, enchanted by the wonders of nature and attentive to its minutest manifestations, would hold his breath over the microscope-camera station and take more than 5,000 photographs of snow crystals — each a vanishing masterpiece with the delicacy of a flower and the mathematical precision of a honeycomb, a ghost of perfection melting onto the glass plate within seconds, a sublime metaphor for the ecstasy and impermanence of beauty, of life itself. A generation after the invention of photography recalibrated our relationship to impermanence, Wilson Bentley devoted his life to popularizing the uniqueness of snowflakes and helping others appreciate the ephemeral “masterpiece of design” that each snowflake is, its singular and fleeting existence never to be replicated, its beauty gone “without leaving any record behind.” Wilson Bentley at work In his later years, he reflected on the adolescent passion that would become his life’s work:
And so he did. Wilson Bentley, who comes alive in Duncan Blanchard’s wonderful 1998 biography The Snowflake Man (public library), grew famous as Snowflake Bentley, establishing himself as the world’s first snowflake photographer and enrapturing vast audiences with nature’s masterworks of ephemeral perfection. Half a century after he first grew enchanted with the photomicroscopy of snowflakes, in a 1922 article for Popular Mechanics, Bentley extolled the rewards of this art purchased by physical hardship in below-freezing temperatures:
Months before his death, his life’s work was finally published under the title Snow Crystals — a scrumptious monograph of 2,500 of his most beguiling photographs, which remains in print today as Snowflakes in Photographs (public library). Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s haunting photomicroscopy of tears cried under various emotions and these gorgeous vintage illustrations of scientific process and phenomena — including an early diagram of snowflake geometries — from a French physics textbook predating the widespread application of photography, then revisit the story of how, a generation before Bentley, the young photographer John Adams Whipple changed our relationship to impermanence with his pioneering astrophotography.
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The Secret History of Facial Recognition | WIRED
10 Lesser-known Murder Mysteries That Remain Unsolved – Listverse
8 Recent Breakthroughs That Prove The Future Is Already Here – Listverse
IKEA is on track to beat its 2020 renewable energy goals | World Economic Forum
10 Well Known Movies With Bizarre Backstories – Listverse
China Quarantines Three More Entire Cities to Fight Pandemic
Mysterious, Deadly Chinese Virus Officially Reaches the US
Mysterious Chinese Virus May Have Spread From Snakes
Car – A Haiku by jay
Dark start chromatic
A little, springy car feeds
betrayed by the fish
Random Acts of Kindness
Wisdom Quotes
It’s not the words you speak, but the way you say them that matters.
People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude. (John C. Maxwell)
Courage is to be terrified, but remain unaffected in your actions.
Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears. (Arthur Koestler)
Sun Tzu Quotes
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“If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him.”― Sun Tzu
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“Every animal with blood in its veins and horns on its head will fight when it is attacked.”― Sun Tzu
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“Know the enemy, know yourself and victory is never in doubt, not in a hundred battles.”― Sun Tzu
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“Those skilled in warfare move the enemy, and are not moved by the enemy.”― Sun Tzu
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“Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive.”― Sun Tzu