(1) Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho! enfant terrible! - is almost a conservative ("With my ideology I’m considered borderline conservative now") and sounding a little like he's auditioning for the American version of Grumpy Old Men: "there were no helicoptering parents, I barely saw my father and we rode bikes and played in other neighbourhoods, like the Canyons above Los Angeles. We didn’t have cell phones; our parents didn’t monitor us. No parent of mine came to a dress rehearsal of the school musical and posted about it on Facebook. I could barely get my parents to come, and that was normal. My parents took us to the movies they wanted to see. There wasn’t this kid culture." There there, Bret: we all have Facebook friends who share too much.
(2) Are you a hoarder? The official way to find out is here.
(3) "Here’s something interesting: the sky is dark at night. No, you say. Never. But, then, why is it dark? It is filled with billions of billions of stars, so many in fact that at every point in the sky one shines. We are surrounded by beacons of nuclear fusion which emit light that can travel uninterrupted in the vacuum of space for millions of years. If in every direction there is a star, everywhere should be burning white. But we see pinpricks in the dark. Is this not odd?" More here.
(4) Interesting people who think differently (not altogether differently from each other, but differently from most people): Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Dominic Cummings.
(5) Nixon. What a guy! "Arthur Garfield Hays of the generally left-wing American Civil Liberties Union sparred good-naturedly with Nixon, whose fairness, he said, “confirms my faith in the American system of government”. ... [Later, in the 'Checkers' speech] “In thirty minutes”, a Time magazine reporter concluded, “by the exposure of his personality, he had changed from a liability to his party to a shining asset. He had established himself as a man of integrity and courage.” Eisenhower himself changed his mind about his running mate. “Well that boy’s got a lot of courage”, he remarked." Oh, and he did some bad things too.
(6) "Those people (you know the ones) keep banging on about how they are being silenced and you can't anything any more and it's PC gone mad - but they are talking non-stop, so it must be rubbish." You've heard the argument. Here's the counter-argument.
(7) Women's magazines of the past: "In the February 1901 issue of Ladies Home Journal, on a single page between a portrayal on the “Life of an English Girl” and a feature asking, “Is the Newspaper Office the Place for a Girl?,” the then-obscure American architect Frank Lloyd Wright published plans for a home “in a prairie town.” It might seem like a strange host for architectural plans, but Ladies Home Journal frequently featured them, amid Rubifoam toothpaste ads, tips on what to do with cheese, serialized romance novels, and journalistic muckraking. It makes sense: Architecture is the foundation of home life, a matter largely relegated to women then—and still today, like it or not." More (about open-plan living - "Today’s homes are far larger than their predecessors, and yet they often boast fewer types of spaces" - not women's magazines) here. Is that an unusual place for architecture? Not really. A lot of what used to be architecture is now interior design. Do ambitious architects design domestic houses for middle-class families any more? If they did, I don't see why the plans wouldn't feature in a magazine with diet plans and true-life crime stories.
(8) A freediver dancing. Don't try this at home.
(9) China's communists fund Jacinda Ardern's Labour Party Forget about Russia, guys.
