Kristian Niemietz: Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Review. ...Karl Marx’s ambivalent attitude towards capitalism. Disgusted as he most famously was by capitalism’s excesses, he was clearly also impressed by its immense productive potential. He reconciled these conflicting impulses by dreaming up a theory of history in which capitalism represented a necessary but transient stage in the story of human progress. (more)

Freemasonry or Masonry consists of fraternal organizations that trace their origins to the local fraternities of stonemasons that from the end of the 14th century regulated the qualifications of stonemasons and their interaction with authorities and clients. Freemasonry has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theorys throughout the years... The degrees of Freemasonry retain the three grades of medieval craft guilds, those of Apprentice, Journeyman or fellow (now called Fellowcraft), and Master Mason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry (more)

carbon dioxide (more)

book by Samuel Shem about hospital 1st-year residents - ISBN:0440133688 (more)

model of Nursing Home Design, reminds me a bit of Alexander Patterns and Jane Jacobs (more)

Zulip: Open-source team live-chat with topic-based threading (more)

Mike Traven on: The Ministry for the Future. *the world manages to actually set up an institution to represent the interest of future generations. It asks the question, what if humanity actually took its collective responsibility seriously? What would that look like? (more)

Sci-Fi Doesn't Have to Be Depressing: Welcome to Solarpunk (Optimistic Near Future Vision) (more)

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (from 1986) (more)

Tiago Forte: Octavia Estelle Butler: Notetaking as Science Fiction. ...winning multiple Hugo and Nebula awards and in 1995 becoming the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. (more)

Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[1] Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction.[2][3][4] Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville (China Mieville), sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European folklore and gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, and H. P. Lovecraft.[2][4] Weird fiction often attempts to inspire awe as well as fear in response to its fictional creations, causing commentators like Miéville to paraphrase Goethe in saying that weird fiction evokes a sense of the numinous.[2] Although "weird fiction" has been chiefly used as a historical description for works through the 1930s, it experienced a resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, under the labels of New Weird and Slipstream, which continues into the 21st century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_fiction

Slipstream is a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. The term was coined by Richard Dorsett according to an interview with renowned cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in Mythaxis Review... Slipstream fiction has consequently been described as "the fiction of strangeness"[3] or a form of writing that makes "the familiar strange or the strange familiar" through epistemological and ontological questionings about reality.[4] Science fiction authors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, argue cognitive dissonance is at the heart of slipstream, and it is not so much a genre as a literary effect, like horror or comedy... While some slipstream novels employ elements of science fiction or fantasy, not all do. The common unifying factor of these pieces of literature is some degree of the surreal, the not-entirely-real, or the markedly anti-real[original research?]. According to Kelly and Kessel, however, there are three basic characteristics of a slipstream narrative: it disrupts the principle of realism; it is not a traditional fantasy story; and, it is a postmodern narrative.[4] As an emerging genre, slipstream has been described as nonrealistic fiction with a postmodern sensibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipstream_genre (more)

Noir fiction (or roman noir) is a subgenre of crime fiction. In its modern form, noir has come to denote a marked darkness in theme and subject matter, generally featuring a disturbing mixture of sex and violence.[1] While related to and frequently confused with hardboiled detective fiction—due to the regular adaptation of hardboiled detective stories in the film noir style—the two are not the same.[2] Both regularly take place against a backdrop of systemic and institutional corruption. However, noir (French for "black") fiction is centred on protagonists that are either victims, suspects, or perpetrators—often self-destructive. A typical protagonist of noir fiction is forced to deal with a corrupt legal, political or other system, through which the protagonist is either victimized and/or has to victimize others, leading to a lose-lose situation. Otto Penzler argues that the traditional hardboiled detective story and noir story are "diametrically opposed, with mutually exclusive philosophical premises". While the classic hardboiled private detective—as exemplified by the creations of writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane—may bend or break the law, this is done by a protagonist with meaningful agency in pursuit of justice, and "although not every one of their cases may have a happy conclusion, the hero nonetheless will emerge with a clean ethical slate."[3][4][5] Noir works, on the other hand, whether films, novels, or short stories, are existential pessimistic tales about people, including (or especially) protagonists who are seriously flawed and morally questionable. The tone is generally bleak and nihilistic, with characters whose greed, lust, jealousy, and alienation lead them into a downward spiral as their plans and schemes inevitably go awry. ... The machinations of their relentless lust will cause them to lie, steal, cheat, and even kill as they become more and more entangled in a web from which they cannot possibly extricate themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_fiction (more)

noir author

Mark Bernstein: Plot I think that Michael Joyce — an MFA-wielding disciple of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — was reacting against a different and more substantial opponent, the Victorian sentimental novel. “Sentimental” in this context has a precise, technical meaning: it refers to art that tries to teach us how we ought to feel. This was a great project of the 19th century: think Dickens and Trollope and Victor Hugo: the purpose of the plot was to show you how a good person ought to think about the world. Modernism saw this use of plot as a chump’s game. (more)

Genre (from French genre 'kind, or sort'[1]) is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time.[2] In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria, yet genres can be aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative, or functional. Genres form by conventions that change over time as cultures invent new genres and discontinue the use of old ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre (more)

Peter Limberg: Meme to Vibe: A Philosophical Report. The consensus is that the word is an overused catchall, engendering many lazy phrases: the vibes are off, it’s not a vibe, such a vibe, don't doubt your vibe, just vibe, etc. All this vibe talk was getting too much for some. (more)

Simone Stolzoff: Playing a Career Game You Actually Want to Win. After a half-decade of working in tech marketing, I grew disillusioned by the corporate presentations and ad campaigns. I wanted to be a real writer. So I decided to pursue a degree to legitimize my intention. (more)

In new guidance, FDA says AI tools to warn of sepsis should be regulated as devices. The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday published a list of artificial intelligence tools that should be regulated as medical devices, in some cases appearing to expand its oversight of previously unregulated software products. (more)

How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them. Cigna sent van Terheyden a letter explaining that it would not pay for the $350 test because it was not “medically necessary.” (more)