Новости за 06.10.2016

The life of a Hollywood agent. “What is a good agent? Before we go into detail I’d say that the basic thing is to answer the phone. A good agent is a person with bargaining skill. A brilliant agent is a person with information. A brilliant agent will have an arsenal unknown to the client, and unknown to anyone. This agent will not manage expectations: he will produce, direct and dress expectations, he will bring the client to achieve things that nobody expected, especially the client”

Computer scientists have worked out how to divide a cake fairly among any number of people, thereby solving a problem that has frustrated mathematicians for decades. But don’t expect to do this at home: “The algorithm is extraordinarily complex: Dividing a cake among n players can require as many as n^n^n^n^n^n steps and a roughly equivalent number of cuts. Even for just a handful of players, this number is greater than the number of atoms in the universe”

Wide-ranging interview. Interesting throughout. Topics include: Management, politics, Donald Trump, media, shaming, race, single mothers, animal rights. On management: “You can teach a lot of skills, but you can’t teach obsession. There’s a real difference between somebody who is obsessed with the work they’re doing and someone who is simply skilled at the work they’re doing. I will take the obsession and teach the skills over getting the skills and having to teach the obsession”

On migraine, an illness consisting entirely of symptoms — and what symptoms they are. “From the Greek hemi (half) and kranion (skull), migraine is associated with severe, throbbing, unilateral pain; an aversion to light and sound; and nausea and vomiting, all of which is aggravated by movement. An attack may be announced by sudden exhaustion, food cravings, a foul mood, or what is called an aura, a neurological phenomenon that disrupts a sufferer’s vision with silvery squiggles and zigzags”

Gripping multi-part exposé of a vast criminal conspiracy in the Chicago police force, and the hounding of officers who tried to blow the whistle on it. In the city’s big housing projects, instead of suppressing the drugs trade, the police organised their own protection racket around it. “Think of the police as the working poor. Create a situation in which there’s lots of money and drugs on the street in neighborhoods no one gives a f**k about. What do you think is going to happen?”

Diary of a sea-voyage through Antarctica. “Of all the penguin species, Adélies are the most cartoon-like. Sitting among the king penguins on Macquarie Island felt like watching the deliberations of a select committee, whose members would confer among themselves before sending an inspection team to peck your boots. Adélie penguins give the impression of forever being late to an important appointment. When they run, they fling back their flippers and rock perilously back and forth”

Britain’s retreat from Empire is remembered as a relatively decent business — but that is because the British falsified the historical record by systematically burning or removing any documents that showed them in a bad light. The aim of “Operation Legacy” was to ensure that “the British way of doing things” would be remembered with “fondness and respect”. Documents abstracted from Kenya alone, including records of torture, filled 60 metres of shelving in a secret Foreign Office depository