The Last Friday

Stephen J. Cannell, Dante, China's invisibility material, Aging potentially may become optional, Real hope for election, Situation Normal, The Cabbage Fairy, Bebes a Vendre, BBC presenter

Oct 04, 2024

This is my last Friday roundup. I may return to the format later, but for now people just aren’t interested in sharing their picks, maybe.

I know many or most of you are not aspiring writers, but writers. Nonetheless, here’s good advice anyway from TV writer Stephen J. Cannell on when writing doesn’t work and looking always forward:

You can think of this as a Halloween piece:

Study the Great Books

Dante's Inferno

When Dante Alighieri wrote his Divine Comedy he did not have just one purpose in mind, rather, he wrote a complex masterpiece of theology, philosophy, and politics. Such complexity in one work could hardly have been achieved with the same force or effect had it been written in prose rather than poetry. The complexity of Dante’s purpose was met by the fl…

a year ago · 11 likes · Jacob Allee

Aging Might Not Be Inevitable. Researchers at MIT have been talking about this for about 15 years too: https://www.wired.com/story/aging-might-not-be-inevitable-wired-health-venki-ramakrishnan/

Real hope for the election, if only we leave the corruption behind and move into it: https://artsx.substack.com/cp/149670410

Goku’s selections below are Michael Estrin's launch of Crime Fiction, and the first narrative film ever made (1896) the short "La Fée aux Choux" (The Cabbage Fairy) by director Alice Guy-Blaché. And what looks like an ad for child markets that spring up when there’s no abortion, sadly! Civilization is a bitch.