stevenwoo

Maybe not for your first reading but I liked Emily Wilson’s Sumerian trilogy that reimagines the stories including Gilgamesh in fantasy setting.

I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).

The way this was handled before these gig economy food delivery companies sprang up. People didn't automatically die of starvation because they were disabled and became adults prior to DoorDash. Medicaid and Meals on Wheels fill in some of the gaps depending upon age and state.

It’s just an excerpt and not applicable to some but Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet has a good if longer bit: “Are not all careers the same? Filled with demands and people filled with animosity towards the individual. At the same time absorbing the hatred of those who have silently and sullenly adapted to dull duty.”

Also quiet layoff by encouraging workers to leave.

I feel this is worse than Nintendo’s “solution” to Switch joycon drift - giving us in the USA (for now) free refurb/fixes which must be cheaper than admitting there’s an issue, but still a cost/brand trust problem.

It had a brief fad then but I just read Bleak House last year and in the later editions Dickens defended his inclusion of the person spontaneously combusting in an introduction, because it had allegedly happened in UK and this was around 1850s. This is possibly responsible for why it pops up now and again.

The Hearst papers uses some pretty terrible ad networks and it’s done so for years so one would have to assume it’s on purpose, like torrent tracker website ads. I only put up with it cause it’s free for now.

I think the Powell Memorandum (as response to nascent consumersm ala Nader) and Powell’s rise to Supreme Court Justice from US chamber of commerce points to deep roots of corporate takeover of USA.

This happens in first episode of recent East of Eden adaptation when Cyrus Trask claims to have been at all the major Civil War battles.

I had to frequently pause my read to research a discovery in more depth to understand the significance of it and I got a chuckle when he marries his childhood sweetheart because she got no mention prior to that point in the book.

On the Origin of Sex - real life examples that seem like science fiction. How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch, I read last year but goes into most recent discoveries in physics.

The audiobook version I listened to had different narrators for main text and footnote with audio cue when footnote started as well.

AFAIK he was outright lying when he said he forgot his zip code. It hasn’t been possible to buy gas in Bay Area for decades without inputting your zip code for credit card purchases. That smelled of some bad speechwriting.