Новости за 01.11.2016

Highly entertaining interview with the Scottish writer and painter, described here as a “little grey deity” and a “notoriously digressive and polymathic conversationalist” with “a high voice capable of a range of reedy, shrill, or menacing intonations”. The digressive quality is much in evidence. “Throughout our interview, Gray gallantly struggled to quell his discursive tendencies, sometimes shuddering and saying, ­unprompted, ‘I’m trying to stick to your question!’ as if to do so caused physical... Читать дальше...

Heartbreaking account of Chinese children abandoned in rural villages — sometimes to the care of grandparents, sometimes to no care at all — by parents seeking work in distant cities. “Last summer in Guizhou province, one of China’s poorest, four left-behind siblings aged five to 14 living in squalid conditions killed themselves by drinking pesticide. According to state media they left a note: ‘Thanks for your kindness. I know you mean well for us, but we should go now’”

BEST OF 2016 Gorgeous. A journey northward from Inverness in search of the trees and forests of Scotland — the ancient, the ruined, the lost-for-ever. “They call this the Flow Country, from the Old Norse flóa, meaning flood. The Vikings would have felt quite at home here, the closest thing Britain has to subarctic tundra. One’s eye may roam for miles all around, unfettered, over empty lands where once there were trees, and then there were people, and now there is nothing”

There is no such thing as free shipping. The cost are swallowed by the supplier, or by the platform, or concealed in the sale price. If they were broken out, online commerce would look very different. “Direct-to-home has a supply-chain cost three times higher than a store-based model. So when we say the internet retailer can charge less, how can that be? Maybe this is why so many of us have so much trouble emulating Amazon’s model and making any money. It’s a very expensive model”

Sunshine and Hollywood lured Mac and Dick McDonald from New Hampshire to California in the 1920s. They hauled scenery, saved hard, and bought a cinema. Then came the Depression. They opened a food stand, which became a drive-in, and they did pretty well. In 1948 they decided they could do better: “How, they wondered, could they streamline operations for maximum profit? How could they distinguish themselves from the other drive-ins? How could they speed up service?”

A journey through Crimea. “I met a six-year-old who could make borscht; her twelve-year-old brother could dive for mussels. Neither could read — but what good was reading when you were hungry for dinner? The children reminded me of deer, slim and agile, with caramel limbs and sun-bleached hair. They almost never cried, probably because no one would have listened. If they did, they would do it in private, going off into some rocky corner, returning to the group when they were finished”

Notes from focus-grouping a hospital website. “We wanted to hear about the difficulties of caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s disease. We wanted to know what it felt like to receive a cancer diagnosis after a long journey to many doctors across a spectrum of specialties. We knew that the client was behind the two-way mirror, concerned about the website navigation, but we also knew that we were going to get to someplace much more important by following wherever these stories took us”

Splendid interview. Never a dull moment, especially when discussing the break-up with Richie Sambora: “Yeah. I swear on my career, and on my children, there was no fight. He has [he waves an imaginary bottle] issues and he can’t deal with them. There’s obligations. You’re not 20. You have to show up. Get help, OK? I’m here to help. You don’t want the help? I can’t force anybody to make lifestyle choices. The s**t that I had to go through on that last tour. I have earned this grey hair”

The history and practice of karaoke. “In the late 1960s Daisuke Inoue was working as a club keyboardist in Kobe, accompanying drinkers who wanted to belt out a song. The head of a steel company asked Inoue to join him at a hot springs resort. Inoue declined, but recorded a backing tape tailored to the client’s erratic singing style. It was a success. Intuiting a demand, Inoue built a jukebox-like device fitted with a microphone and leased an initial batch to bars across the city”