The Bloggess: And that’s why you should learn to pick your battles. By Jenny Lawson, June 21, 2011.
This is an old blog entry, but apparently it’s famous, at least in some circles.
Category Archives: Books and Reading
“The horrors of surviving nearly three years in a concentration camp left him with a lifetime of fear and paranoia”
BBC: The Tattooist of Auschwitz – and his secret love.
“For more than 50 years, Lale Sokolov lived with a secret – one born in the horrors of wartime Europe, in a place that witnessed some of the worst of man’s inhumanity to man.
It would not be shared until he was in his 80s, thousands of miles from that place.
Lale had been the Tattooist of Auschwitz.”
Link via MetaFilter.
“An old tongue’s new tricks”
The Economist: The strange reinvention of Icelandic. “A language both ancient and modern.”
“In perhaps their most famous example of purist creativity, when a word for computer was needed in the 1960s, the planners coined tölva, combining tala (“number“ ) and völva, an old word for prophetess. When doctors started talking about AIDS using the English acronym rather than its long, literal Icelandic translation, heilkenni áunnins ónæmisbrests [spoken], the committee coined two shorter alternatives: alnæmi [spoken], something like “all-susceptibility“ , and eyðni, which sounds like the English term, but comes from the Icelandic eyða, meaning “to destroy“ . When Icelanders started saying “podcast“ , the council quickly responded with hlaðvarp [spoken], from roots meaning “charge“ (squint and you can see hlaða as a distant cousin to “load“ ) and “throw“ .”
Twilight of American Sanity
Inquring Minds: Allen Frances – A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. “We talk to renowned psychiatrist Allen Frances about his latest book Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump.” The Podcast (42:19min) was first aired October 17, 2017 and is available for download, on iTunes etc.
Yes, I’m a little behind on my podcasts, but I’m catching up during the winter holidays.
“There were hundreds of letters, stretching over four years of war and beyond.”
The Washington Post: Brothers in arms. “Four siblings wrote hundreds of letters to each other during World War II. The story they tell of service, sacrifice and trauma was hidden away in an abandoned storage unit — until now.”
“We have been called out on air raid alarms the last few days, but you know as much about what was happening as I do, the radio is the only dope we get as well as you about them Japs and nasty Germans. Bastards are what they are, raiding without warnings, sneaking up at night and such wrong methods of a clean fight.”
There’s also a related podcast called Letters From War:
“Bringing the letters to life are modern U.S. military veterans. At key moments in the story, we’ll talk to them about how these letters compare to their own experiences — what’s universal about war and what’s changed. How they felt reading the words of these men who fought some 70 years ago. And why everyone who picks up these letters feels like the Eyde brothers become a part of their family.”
So far, a short introduction and the first episode have been published.
See also MetaFilter: Letters From WWII found in a storage locker.