FT: “[Francis] Bacon articulated a new attitude to nature. As he famously wrote: “Knowledge itself is power.” Nature was not to be revered but interrogated, understood and ultimately controlled. His focus was what he called the “relief of man’s estate”: the systematic enlargement of human knowledge and human prosperity. That foundational ambition to “master nature” is arguably one of the most consequential ideas in history, for good and ill. It underlies the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It also sits behind modern demographic and ecological crises — and the technological revolution of our own age. Yet mastery, in Bacon’s sense, always invoked ambiguity. To understand nature is to gain power over it — but also to become newly dependent on the systems we create. Modern societies are not only masters of nature; they are also entangled in vast technological networks they can neither fully predict nor easily control.”
NYTimes: “Body weight workouts are a convenient and inexpensive way get in shape. But it’s easy to get bored with them or start to plateau. If you want to train your balance or build more explosive power, there is a simple way to level up your exercises by using a standard household step or even the curb outside. “That little bit of height can make an exercise easier or more difficult,” said Dr. Kyle Lau, team physician for the athletics department at the University of California, Los Angeles. For example, you can place your hands on the step to make push-ups easier. Or you can elevate your feet on one or even two steps to make them more challenging.”
WSJ: ““The diary’s dailiness sets it apart in the self-writing sea,” Ms. Rubiner observes. “While a memoir or formal autobiography aims to offer a retrospective story, the diary typically doesn’t, or can’t, because it is written from the middle of an unfolding life.” Having said as much, she hastens to clarify that entries needn’t be made daily for a diary to qualify; nor need the diarist use a physical notebook (some use video or apps); nor indeed need a diary contain personal reflections. The diaries of some consist of little more than, say, a dispassionate daily notation of the weather (my grandfather). The diaries of others (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath) are rich, intimate and self-searching. Still others have charted terrible and turbulent periods of history, the most famous of these being the World War II writings of Anne Frank.”
Neil Borate: “Almost a decade after Coffee Can Investing, Saurabh Mukherjea says the idea is dead. Consumption has crawled. Those fabled moated compounders aren’t compounding. And India, he warns, is heading for a 1991-style crisis.”
