«[T]here's [an] aspect of the way we manage globalization that I think contributes in an important way to inequality, and that is, I think it's very asymmetric. We allow free movement of goods, free movement of capital, but there's not a free movement of labor.

And what does that mean? It means that corporations can come to workers and they can say: "Look, if you don't accept lower wages, we're going to move to China or some place else, and we can bring our goods back to the US". So, either they accept the lower wages or either they accept the loss of jobs. They are really put in a bind.

I tell my students: "Think about a different set of rules. Think about what would happen if we said labor could move freely but capital couldn't, you could imagine that." And then countries would have to compete to get labor, schooled labor, to move within their country. You'd have to have good schools, clean air... A very different society that the one that we're having, where we're having a race to the bottom, in terms of workers.

That's just another example of how our rules increase inequality and weaken our society. »


Joseph Stiglitz, presentando su libro "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future" en el Commonwealth Club de California. [A partir de 35 min 15 s]

«I'm pessimistic about a lot of things, but [...] there's no reason to be miserable about it.»

Cormac McCarthy

Esta es la idea

«There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.»

(Supuestamente) Albert Einstein

Ella

«[Ella Fitzgerald] performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis's contemporaneous integration of white and African-American soul. Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians.»

Gracias a Carlos Galilea, en el programa de ayer de Cuando los elefantes sueñan con la música, titulado Ella y Milton, me entero de esta frase (¡grande!), que apareció en la necrológica de Ella en el New York Times y yo he encontrado en Wikipedia.

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

Lawrence M. Krauss

«If you've been a fan for as long as I have been there's a trust that's been built up over time, and it becomes this thing where it's like you're getting a phone call from a friend you haven't heard of in a long time, and you're getting his perspective, and what he's been up to. It's just this sort of intimate thing that you can't get from anybody else.»

Ron Sexsmith, hablando sobre la música de Leonard Cohen

Para quienes vais de originales

"Existir es un plagio."

Emil Cioran

Hala, volved a por otra :)

(Vía Mike Cane)

Ventajas de la ignorancia

La gran ventaja de la ignorancia es que permite de vez en cuando la alegría del descubrimiento. Yo escribo ahora mismo urgido por esa alegría, por el asombro de haber encontrado una escritura de la que hasta hace unos días no sabía nada y que ahora va conmigo como una voz nueva y fiel [...]. Uno, aunque no lo quiera, es tan provinciano que automáticamente considera falto de mérito o poco importante a un escritor por el simple hecho de que nunca ha escuchado su nombre. Como si uno lo supiera todo.

Antonio Muñoz Molina, en su artículo "El poeta en el mundo" el otro día en Babelia.

Lo que le pasa a MM con la poesía a mí me sucede con la música. Eso sí, mucho menos de lo que me gustaría; creo que porque no sé cómo buscar.

Del último de mis descubrimientos ya hace tiempo y desde entonces nada de lo que he escuchado (que no son tantas cosas, no nos flipemos) se me ha quedado pegado como las canciones de Zoe Muth:



(Su último disco, Starlight Hotel, está en Spotify.)

“Their selves were on their shelves”

Anne Fadiman (vía José Antonio Millán; foto de chotda@flickr)

Como sé que no es de buena educación internauta, y aunque me ha costado, me refreno para no copiar aquí el artículo entero pero, como me pasa tantas veces con MM, lo suscribo de pe a pa:

Cuanto mayor me hago menos me gustan las abstracciones y las vaguedades, menos me fío de ellas. En la política y en la literatura lo que busco y exijo es la precisión. Al pan pan, y al vino vino. Los tiranos y los ideólogos son vendedores de humo que acaban siempre envolviendo en una niebla de palabrería la crueldad tangible de sus propósitos. Palabras como “pueblo” esconden siempre una trampa, y da igual si se usan afirmativa o negativamente. Esas apelaciones a colectividades vaporosas que no tienen una imediata traducción estadística o legal me hacen saltar todas las alarmas. Yo no sé cómo son los españoles, igual que no sé cómo son los americanos, o los turistas, o los escritores, o los aragoneses, o los obreros, o las mujeres. Lo más que puedo llegar a saber es cuántas personas han votado una cierta opción en unas elecciones, o cuántas cumplen los requisitos legales que atestiguan una ciudadanía. La ciudadanía puede cambiar, igual que el voto. Nadie está condenado a ser nada por nacimiento. Nadie nace elegido.

Antonio Muñoz Molina, Esa mirada, en su blog.

“Las mujeres necesitamos la belleza para que los hombres nos amen, y la estupidez para amarlos a ellos.”

Coco Chanel

(Vía Patsybup's Ramblings)

Moving the goalposts

Otro motivo por el que no me creo la religión: a medida que la ciencia va avanzando, los creyentes (o mejor, quienes los pastorean) van "moviendo los palos" continuamente; todo vale con tal de evitar reconocer que su portería es un coladero:

In his china teapot analogy, the philosopher Bertrand Russell illustrates the futility of holding on to concepts that have no observable consequences. Russell asserts that he believes there is a small china teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars, which is too small to be discovered by the most powerful telescopes in existence. If a larger telescope is constructed and, after an exhaustive and time-consuming survey of the entire sky, finds no evidence of the teapot, Russell will claim that the teapot is slightly smaller than expected but still there. This is commonly known as “moving the goalposts.” Although the teapot may never be observed, it is an “intolerable presumption,” says Russell, on the part of the human race to doubt its existence. Indeed, the rest of the human race should respect his position, no matter how preposterous it appears. Russell’s point is not to assert his right to be left alone to his personal delusions, but that devising a theory that cannot be proved or disproved by observation is pointless in the sense that it teaches you nothing, irrespective of how passionately you may believe in it.

Brian Cox y Jeff Forshaw, en Why Does E = mc2?

“La belleza es la expresión de una cierta manera de buscar la felicidad”

Stendhal (gracias a Muñoz Molina)

Live in the world

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package,” she said. ”I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

Joan Didion

(Queda mucho más bonito en FuckYeahJoanDidion, donde lo encontré :-)

Blue Nights

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming — in fact not at all a warming — yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. [The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." The very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes — the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour — carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.]

FuckYeahJoanDidion

Blue Nights

To prepare a presentation for Primordial Pizza was to violate its most solemn and sacred tenet: Don't be afraid to be wrong. And that directive went for graduate students and visiting Nobel laureates alike. The riff was more important than the result. You got up and improvised. You jammed. You played cosmology as if it were jazz.

Richard Panek, The 4 Percent Universe 

El nombre y la función

Creo que lo he leído a propósito de la muerte de Steve Jobs, pero no sé dónde y ahora no me voy a poner buscarlo. La frase que me ronda la kabeza desde hace unos días dice algo así:

Cuando a la gente mayor se le muestra un nuevo aparato, lo primero que preguntan es: ¿cómo se llama esto?; cuando se hace lo propio con jóvenes (o niños, no recuerdo), preguntan: ¿qué puedo hacer con él?

Steve Jobs

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.

...Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. ...

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Steve Jobs

De su famoso discurso en la ceremonia de graduación de Stanford en 2005 (texto completo en inglés y en español.)

(vía Planet Money)

Palabras

To use words to point beyond words; to use well-formulated sentences to point out that there exist aspects of reality that are not captured by well-formulated sentences is a form of mental judo. It points to a different use of language than that with which we are familiar. Yet if we were talking about music, everyone would recognize the difference between the music itself and a description of the music. So it is with science and the natural world that science describes.

Reality is not a data bank, nor can it be reduced to a finite set of laws or to a deductive system. Any system inevitably misses something. Words, symbols, and systems are all incomplete. Strangely enough, what is missed is not so much some extremely complex and subtle theoretical structure, a kind of superstring theory. The essence of what is missed is something that is not at all abstract or complex. It is the very process of abstraction, the representation of reality by language and mathematical symbols, which misses something.

William Byers, en The Blind Spot

Tocando de oído

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in you mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. 

[Nota bene: It tells you. You don’t tell it.]

Joan Didion, en Why I Write (.doc)