Recommend your longform reads

I just found out the guardian's long reads is available in podcast form on Spotify. This is amazing.
 
Pretty good article in The Atlantic on Preston's business model to promote the local economy by accepting tenders from local businesses and co-ops.

Using a law introduced in 2012, officials in Preston began picking contractors that promised more than just financial value. Local companies are, for example, able to compete for construction contracts by providing training to local apprentices, or by offering a smaller carbon footprint through employing tradesmen who don’t have to travel far. The council teamed up with five other institutions, including the police and the local university, to split big procurement contracts—in one case, Brown told me, a £1.6 million catering contact was broken off into smaller ones, to advantage local farmers.
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I'm always fascinated by the idea of micro-economies and how they are more conducive to quick feedback and responding to changes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/05/british-town-local-economy/588943/
 
I had not remembered, until I reread “Slaughterhouse-Five,” that that famous phrase “So it goes” is used only and always as a comment on death. Sometimes a phrase from a novel or a play or a film can catch the imagination so powerfully—even when misquoted—that it lifts off from the page and acquires an independent life of its own. “Come up and see me sometime” and “Play it again, Sam” are misquotations of this type. Something of this sort has also happened to the phrase “So it goes.” The trouble is that when this kind of liftoff happens to a phrase its original context is lost. I suspect that many people who have not read Vonnegut are familiar with the phrase, but they, and also, I suspect, many people who have read Vonnegut, think of it as a kind of resigned commentary on life. Life rarely turns out in the way the living hope for, and “So it goes” has become one of the ways in which we verbally shrug our shoulders and accept what life gives us. But that is not its purpose in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” “So it goes” is not a way of accepting life but, rather, of facing death. It occurs in the text almost every single time someone dies, and only when death is evoked.
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Salman Rushdie on Slaughterhouse Five | Newyorker
 
To Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking, Stop Thinking About Yourself

Source: Harvard Business Review

Sarah Gershman said:
Before diving into the information, ask yourself: Who will be in the room? Why are they there? What do they need? Be specific in your answers. Identify the audience’s needs, both spoken and unspoken, and craft a message that speaks directly to those needs.
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Sarah Gershman said:
In reality, each person in the room is listening to you as an individual. And so the best way to connect to your audience is by speaking to them as individuals. How? By making sustained eye contact with one person per thought. (Each thought is about one full clause.) By focusing at one person at a time, you make each person in the room feel like you are talking just to them.
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2cents said:
I disagree with much of this, but it’s a very well-made, thoughtful argument in favor of the restoration of the caliphate:

Who Wants the Caliphate?

https://yaqeeninstitute.org/ovamiranjum/who-wants-the-caliphate/

@Zlatattack @Sultan @RedTiger
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Thanks, I'll have a read tomorrow. I think more than a caliphate or democracy or communism or whatever the next fad will be; Muslim people in Muslim countries want effective governance. The ottoman caliphate (and empires who were loyal to it) was the last time most of it had that in our lands.

Nobody lies in bed worrying about how pious the president is. Security, safety, poverty, I'll health, lack of opportunity - that's what keeps us up at night.
 
ADAM KOTSKO
The Evangelical Mind
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-35/politics/the-evangelical-mind/

While evangelicals often appear as the very quintessence of self-righteousness, they believe that they are actually the only people who—by God’s grace—manage to escape the ever present temptation of self-righteousness. In their mind, by contrast, secular liberals are the dangerously self-righteous ones, asserting their own all-too-human vision of morality without realizing that their sinfulness renders even their best-intentioned actions “splendid vices” (to use a phrase often attributed to Augustine). This is also why evangelicals are so singularly invulnerable to attacks that point out their failure to follow the teachings of Christ. This critique is knocking at an open door: the very core of the evangelical spiritual experience is their deep, gut-level awareness of their inability to reach Christ’s high standards. In their view, Christ did not live a perfect life so that we could follow in his footsteps, but precisely so we wouldn’t have to.
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Found it from here: http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S191226 (Dec 26 2019 show is an interview of the author)
 
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