Category Archives: Books and Reading

Mirjam Pressler

Deutsche Welle: Schriftstellerin und Übersetzerin Mirjam Pressler ist tot. “Als Übersetzerin war sie international bekannt. Am berühmtesten: ihre deutsche Fassung vom “Tagebuch der Anne Frank”. Nach langer Krankheit ist die Jugendbuchautorin Mirjam Pressler mit 78 Jahren gestorben.”

Die Zeit: Schriftstellerin Mirjam Pressler ist tot. “Sie war eine der erfolgreichsten deutschen Kinder- und Jugendbuchautorinnen. Zudem übersetzte sie mehr als 300 Titel. Mirjam Pressler starb im Alter von 78 Jahren.”

“What is now called resisting is often Americans simply helping others: a concept so alien to the Trump administration that it is labelled as subversive.”

The Globe and Mail Opinion, by Sarah Kendzior: The resistance to Donald Trump is not what you think. “There is no unified, hierarchical group on the periphery trying to overthrow the U.S. government. There are only regular people, in every city, hoping for better, and trying to rescue the America they once knew”.
Sarah Kendzior is the author of The View From Flyover Country and the co-host of the podcast Gaslit Nation.

“There is no question that most Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump and the GOP. The question for November is whether dissent matters in the face of an increasingly autocratic regime, one whose disregard for rule of law is unparalleled in U.S. history, and one that may have engaged in voter suppression and one whose associates are being investigated for whether they collaborated with operatives of hostile states to win the previous election. The midterms have become an existential matter: Will we salvage our damaged democracy, or lose what rights remain? For non-white Americans, immigrants, women, LGBTQ Americans and other groups targeted by the administration, there is nothing abstract about this inquiry.

I spent most of the year on the road in America, and I don’t think we, as a people, are as cruel or mercenary as those who represent us. Political activists and Democrats are not as disorganized as pundits claim. Everything sounds confusing when you listen for a coherent message, and what you hear instead is an anguished cry. But at least that cry is honest. That cry means people still care. The worst sound, these days, is silence.”

Link via MetaFilter.

“Je besser die Bildung, desto schlechter die Augen “

Deutsche Welle: Brille nötig: Kurzsichtig durchs Smartphone. “In 30 Jahren wird jeder zweite Mensch kurzsichtig sein. Schuld ist auch die übermäßige Nutzung von elektronischen Medien, vor allem bei Kindern. Dabei läßt sich Kurzsichtigkeit leicht vermeiden.”

“Der ständige Blick auf den Bildschirm kann vor allem Kinderaugen reizen, ermüden und austrocknen. Eine übermäßige Nutzung von elektronischen Medien führt nach Ansicht der Wissenschaftler aber nicht nur zu mehr Kurzsichtigkeit, es leidet auch das räumliche Vorstellungsvermögen. Verschwommenes Sehen oder Schielen können die Folge sein. “

“To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope.”

The Atlantic: The Education of Bill Oliver. “How a letter to Barack Obama tells the story of two strangers who became family, and one lifelong Republican’s journey to a new kind of patriotism.” By Jeanne Marie Laskas.

“Word came that President Barack Obama wanted to see some of the mail just the day after he took office. Mike Kelleher was the director of the Office of Presidential Correspondence (OPC). He got the call from the Oval saying the president wanted to see five letters. Then they called back with a correction. The president wanted to see 15 letters. They called back one more time. He wanted to see 10 that day, and every day.

“It was a small gesture, I thought, at least to resist the bubble,“ Obama later told me. “It was a way for me to, every day, remember that what I was doing was not about me. It wasn’t about the Washington calculus. It wasn’t about the political scoreboard. It was about the people who were out there living their lives, who were either looking for some help or angry about how I was screwing something up.“

And why should the president be the only one reading 10 letters a day? What about everyone else in the West Wing? Surely Obama’s advisers and senior staff could benefit from seeing this material.
[…]
Fiona Reeves, an OPC staffer who soon became the office’s director, developed a distribution list, kept adding to it. Letters to the president, dozens of them, just popping into people’s inboxes. Why not? And not just the 10LADs—the president’s 10 letters a day—but also others from the sample piles. “We send out batches of letters we think are striking,“ she said. At first she worried about being an annoyance, but then she got bold. “I hope people read them; that’s why I spam them. But I mean, they don’t have to read them.“

They did. Soon people started asking why they weren’t on the distribution list. The people in OPC came to know which people in the West Wing were particularly tuned in to the letters. The OPC staff came to regard these people as special agents, ambassadors, and they had a name for them: Friends of the Mail.”