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Oct 8, 2024 | 
ourcommunitynow.com | Jo Livingstone
ShareThe following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 7, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: Trump just unleashed a long, ugly, crazed rant about Kamala Harris.
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Jul 9, 2024 | 
thestopgap.net | Jo Livingstone
Though I admire the force and energy behind their latest project, 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, the result is imperfect. It’s not terrible, but it isn’t great. A good example of its dodginess would be number 98, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, summarized in the list thus: A famed opera singer performs for a Japanese executive’s birthday at a luxe private home in South America; it’s that kind of party.
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Apr 29, 2024 | 
thestopgap.net | Jo Livingstone
The Stopgap has an improvised etymology and technical language blog going and so unfortunately we cannot ignore the stupidity of the president of the University of Chicago, a man named Paul Alivisatos.
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Apr 23, 2024 | 
thestopgap.net | Jo Livingstone
Today the UN reported on the discovery of many people deeply buried under the earth in Gaza. The dead people were in many cases naked and bound at the hands:Disturbing reports continue to emerge about mass graves in Gaza in which Palestinian victims were reportedly found stripped naked with their hands tied, prompting renewed concerns about possible war crimes amid ongoing Israeli airstrikes, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Tuesday.
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Apr 11, 2024 | 
thestopgap.net | Jo Livingstone
There’s only one good book about how to write: Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Some particular gems:“It is then good to remember that artists have existed and persisted, like the snail and coelacanth and other changing forms of organic life since long before governments were dreamed of.”“I had depressing thoughts that the theme, even though I had thought of it, was better than I was as a writer. Henry James or Thomas Mann could easily write it, but not I.
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Jo Livingstone
Jo Livingstone and I first met at the Oxford Wine Café, a dingy spot just outside Oxford’s city center, in 2018. We had the most engrossing conversation two people have probably ever had about the medieval English mystic Margery Kempe, and how a critic can make old works of literature sing for a contemporary audience. This is one of Jo’s gifts as a writer and a thinker—the ability to draw distant works into the present.
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Apr 8, 2024 | 
thestopgap.net | Jo Livingstone
Horrifically, the British Library's catalogue of illuminated manuscripts is STILL unavailable, due to the following, which is really causing me a lot of problems. Fortunately you've got me. Diagram of a solar eclipse made in the very early 13th century (British Library Royal MS 12 C XVII, f. 32r). Not quite medieval but....a solar eclipse, from Zakariyya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini (1203–1283)and Muhammad ibn Muhammad Shakir Ruzmah-'i Nathani, Turkish Book of the Wonders of Creation.
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Apr 8, 2024 | 
msn.com | Jo Livingstone
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Apr 8, 2024 | 
au.lifestyle.yahoo.com | Jo Livingstone
How Mercury retrograde went viralISTOCKPHOTO/GETTY IMAGESContracts, text messages, ex messages, and shopping for electronic devices: astrologers tell us to steer clear of such activities when Mercury appears to reverse course in the night sky, going from east to west in “retrograde” motion.
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Dec 13, 2023 | 
nybooks.com | Jo Livingstone
The scribes of the Middle Ages wrote predominantly in iron gall ink, the product of an elegant four-ingredient recipe. Certain wasps implant their eggs in the leaves and smaller branches of oak trees. This process produces in the tree a gall: a lump of tannin-rich material in which the larvae grow.
