Weekend Reading
Writing worth reading - 05th/06th Aug 2023
Andy Warhol’s Religious Journey by Paul Elie
“John Paul was in the first bloom of his pontificate, and his image as a young, strong, independent-minded world citizen had been burnished by a visit to New York the previous fall. Warhol was hoping to cap a series of silk-screen celebrity portraits with the Polish pontiff. Warhol and his associate Fred Hughes arrived in Rome thinking they had a private audience, only to find that their tickets were for the weekly general audience. In his diary, Warhol recalled the event: “They finally took us in to our seats with the rest of the 5,000 people and a nun screamed out, ‘You’re Andy Warhol! Can I have your autograph?’…”
AI and the automation of work by Benedict Evans
“When this is happening to your own generation, it seems natural and intuitive to worry that this time, there aren’t going to be those new jobs. We can see the jobs that are going away, but we can’t predict what the new jobs will be, and often they don’t exist yet. We know (or should know), empirically, that there always have been those new jobs in the past, and that they weren’t predictable either: no-one in 1800 would have predicted that in 1900 a million Americans would work on ‘railways’ and no-one in 1900 would have predicted ‘video post-production’ or ‘software engineer’ as employment categories. But it seems insufficient to take it on faith that this will happen now just because it always has in the past. How do you know it will happen this time? Is this different?.....”
Traute Lafrenz obituary by White Rose
“On February 18, 1943, Traute Lafrenz was walking to a neurology lecture at Munich University with her friend Willi Graf when she spotted Sophie and Hans Scholl hurrying through the empty courtyard. The siblings looked purposeful, if a little frazzled, but it was the leather suitcase that caught Lafrenz’s attention.….”
The Feynman Technique: Master the Art of Learning by Mortimer Adler
“When you’re happy with your understanding, take the page you created with a simple explanation and put it into a binder. Following this technique for everything you learn gives you a binder full of learning that you can review a couple of times a year….”
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Thursday 14th September — Manchester — details and signup here.
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