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describing the job of editor. It was not, he said, as it once had been, confined mainly to correcting spelling and punctuation. Rather, it was to know what to publish, how to get it, and what to do to help it achieve the largest readership. At

A. Scott Berg • Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

FLYING INTO AUSTRALIA, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who their prime minister is. I am forever doing this with the Australian prime minister—committing the name to memory, forgetting it (generally more or less instantly), then feeling terribly guilty. My thinking is that there ought to be one person outside Australia who knows.

Bill Bryson • In a Sunburned Country

These ideals were interpreted in a specific, limited way that was fully compatible with the Goldman Sachsification of the US economy: Protecting the environment meant carbon trading. Promoting home ownership meant bundling subprime loans together and reselling them as mortgage-backed securities. Equality meant meritocracy.

Nancy Fraser • The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond

In December 2010,

Michael Green • In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single)

the journey ahead would not be easy for the newly formed nation. At its helm would be a monarch who had refused the title ‘German Kaiser’ and only reluctantly accepted the more neutral ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’. He would forever remain a Prussian king first, second and third. Otto von Bismarck, the architect of the fledgling state and its first chancellor,

Katja Hoyer • Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire

The transformation of the marriage of Freud and Marx, however, from shotgun status to one of genuine love was to take place at the hands of two men, one informally associated with the Frankfurt School, the other perhaps its most significant and influential activist intellectual:

Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, respectively. These two figures are

Carl R. Trueman • The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

He suggests we need to fundamentally reconsider what we’re measuring. It’s not about simply rejecting productivity gains but capturing them “as genuine improvements to human flourishing instead of feeding them back into an endless cycle of escalation”. This might mean measuring ‘time affluence over output volume’ – free time as a success metric – o... See more

337 / Productivity’s empty promise

From Kraftwerk to AI – Berlin’s love affair with music technology is stronger than ever

musictech.com

Again, the majority of Australians are sceptical about the productivity mantra. When they hear that word they see cost-cutting rather than shared benefit.