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Ken Baldwin, (c) Chronicle / Christina Koci Hernandez

Letter from California: Jumpers: The New Yorker
Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water […]

Tim Parks: headhunters, pianists - we’re all the same - Telegraph
His work raises the issue of intervention. The translator’s goal is to vanish, to prevent his own identity from influencing the writer/reader interface.
Now in his fifties, Parks says that “whereas 10 years ago I might have offered […]

article 46 Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Claudio Magris
HUO: …A beautiful conclusion. One last question I always ask at the end of every interview: could you tell me about an unrealised project.
CM: It risks getting long, but let’s say I have always been fascinated by cinema. After secondary school I was unsure for a long time […]

Last Night’s TV: Imagine…Doris Lessing – The Hostess And The Alien, BBC1
I approached the film a little warily, nervous that it might settle for the clichés of formidable old age, indifferent to social and cultural convention. I’d reckoned without Doris Lessing, whose entire life seems to have been conducted with a wild daring, and […]

Oliver Burkeman: This column will change your life | Lifeandhealth | Life and Health
…the psychologist Neal Roese explains in his book, If Only, “If you decide to do something and it turns out badly, research shows that it probably won’t haunt you down the road. You’ll reframe the failure and move on. But […]

Semi interesting musings on the difference between unhappiness and despair from Kieran Setiya.
The nub of the argument:
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…if despair is unhappiness about the impossibility of achieving some good, the good must be an object of commitment – or else irrelevant to one’s happiness – and so it must be something one thinks one could achieve. At […]

An interesting piece in the NY Times about ’soft’ paternalism. The idea is a simple one. Lets say you have a gambling problem. In one of your more lucid moments you decide to sign a self limiting ordnance, that says simply if you enter another casino you will be arrested and any winnings you might […]