The one-time Minnesotan played her first of two sold-out shows at the Armory on Wednesday night. Shell be back on that stage Friday. In between, well endure a very different spectacle just a few blocks away.

Look, I dont want to talk about the guy either, but theres no avoiding the elephant in the Target Center. A president whose thuggish cruelty only endears him further to a fanbase powered by rancid white resentment is here to lie about our community. We can at least be grateful that this invasion will be bookended by a force for good celebrating her pop breakthrough moment.

At the Armory last night, groups of women enjoyed moving their bodies on their own terms, LGBTQ folks celebrated a spectrum of sexuality and gender, and a successful African-American woman onstage declared, both explicitly and in how she carried herself, that life offers pleasures of infinite variety and the complexity of your identity is an asset to be shared and cherished. We should give that America a try.

Lizzo first appeared last night in a pulpit elevated above the stage, the backdrop behind her depicting a church interior, complete with stained glass, and she began with two songs that fit the conceit: Heaven Help Me and Worship. Soon she yielded that perch to her DJ, Sophia Eris, and joined her dancers onstage, glamorously draped in a fringy gold outfit and holding the stage with innate charisma.

The crowd was particularly rapturous. Theres so much Lizzo in the air around here, and local coverage can verge on fawning, so its possible to get jaded, but this music inspires a vibe of real liberation in a room. During Cuz I Love You, women fell to their knees as they belted the over-the-top soul ballad to their pals, reveling in a kind of performative joy that was self-aware but not self-conscious.

In keeping with the church theme, Lizzo preached. Jerome was preceded with a disquisition on the fuckboy (though Lizzo, ever inclusive, reminded us that fuckgirls and fucktheys also lurk out there), as the singer celebrated her fuckboy-free status and contended that these sexually and romantically troublesome nuisances need to learn to love themselves.

Politics was an unavoidable topic. We live in an interesting world, Lizzo beganand if you doubt that at least some part of her is still Minnesotan, why else would she use our states most beloved euphemistic adjective like that? She continued in this generalized vein. A lot of people dont have good intentions. Im not gonna be more specificbut some of you know what I mean.

Still, as she shouted out Ilhan Omar and said the country looks a lot different than the people running things while urging black, brown, queer, and gender-non-conforming young people to get involved in politics, her sympathies were hardly hidden. Eventually she lowered the boom: Clap so hard they can hear it at the Trump rally.

Another extended speech introduced Good As Hell, to the backing of soft piano. Some concerts leave you wanting to be the star you just watched, Lizzo said, but she intended this to be different. Youre gonna leave this concert wanting to be yourself.

I dont know how that reads to you, but in the moment it was well, a moment. And thats the thing with Lizzo: She flirts with the sort of therapeutic self-help clichs that have kept womens magazines in business for decades. But whether tossing hydration into a list of buzzwords like self-care, self-love, and body positivity that we should embrace, or inviting each of us to consider ourselves thicc bitches for the nighteven the undeniably unthicc non-bitchesshe does it with a sexy good humor that yanks kernels of basic truth out of the commodified muck.

Lizzos rise to fame has seemed at times inevitable and at others so steady yet slow that you could never be sure she wouldnt stall somewhere along the way, stranding her at the status of a viral phenomenon with a handful of extremely well-licensed songs. But a lots changed since she was in the Twin Cities last May to play the Palace Theatre in St. Paul. The biggest development is that Truth Hurts has been number one for six weeks so far, smashing the record for longest time atop the charts by a solo female rapper. With that wobbly piano part that sounds like its being played by an animatronic otter in a saloon-themed novelty restaurant for children, and a swerving vocal suggesting just maybe Lizzos had a few, its an ideal set closer, perfect for swaying and singing along.

Lizzos beloved Sasha Flute made its appearance as she played an instrumental prelude to Juice, which honestly felt a mite anticlimactic. But we can hope its vibrant afterglow will help us endure whatever slander were forced to hear dribble out at the Sportpalast tonight. If hate is a virus, Lizzos concert was a vaccination. Lets hope that Friday night she can pull off an exorcism.

Check out our full photo gallery from last night's show here

SetlistHeaven Help MeWorshipCuz I Love YouExactly How I FeelScuse MeWater MeJeromeIt's My Party/CrybabyTempoBoysGigolo Game/Like a GirlSoulmateLingerieGood as HellTruth Hurts

EncoreJuice

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Lizzo at Minneapolis' Armory: Gets political and basks in sold-out adoration - City Pages

Did you know everything is figureoutable? Yes, even those impossible things that plague you every day are figureoutable. At least thats what one of Oprahs favorite thought leaders, TV and podcast host, and life coach,Marie Forleo says in her new book. And considering she started her own business at 23,B-School, a business training program, which was named one of Inc.s 500 fastest growing companies and is now a multi-million dollar company and is now a New York Times best-selling author with her new book Everything is Figureoutable you may not want to write this off as yet another throw away self-help book.

If I walked out of a restaurant and got hit by a bus, this is the one idea Id want to leave behind. If people could just get a fraction of the benefits from this idea, I would feel like my time on earth was well spent, Forleo told Ladders of her new book.

Forleo spoke with Ladders about why she wanted to write this book, dismantling perfectionism and the three things that get her through her day.

Forleo has been labeled as a multi-passionate entrepreneur meaning she has pursued a lot of different things. From building a media empire to being a life coach to starting a dance career in her late 20s (perhaps the most daunting task of them all.) Many of us can relate to having a side passion or even several apart from our regular 9 to 5 job. Perhaps we want to start a small business or write a book but there never seems to be enough time for any of that. Forleo says that the dilemma is figureoutable:

All of us individually and collectively have a lot of stuff to figure out. Three-hundredmillion people suffer from depression suicide rates, we are in this super volatile economic and political environment. So we have some challenges on a broader scale and I feel that this mindset really does help us tap into the innate wisdom that each of us has to solve some of our biggest challenges.

We wake up and look at our phones, we go to the bathroom and we look at our phones. We are unaware of how much time and energy we are frittering away. Whether you want to create a stronger healthier body, or its a novel you want to write. If you prioritize creating before you consume I think that most of us can carve out 20, 35, 45 minutes, maybe even an hour, to make the changes we want to make to so our lives go in the right direction.

As someone who wanted to pursue multiple avenues, Forleo supports others doing the same though she says our structures arent always built for that:

A lot of our models when it comes to careers and professions are archaic and outdated. You chose one thing to be when you were 18 and you stuck with that thing for 30 or 40 years and you got a gold watch and then you retired. And we dont really have a framework for young people out of college that aligns with things that really fire you up or you have some type of innate attraction to. You need to not worry that you dont have a set career path.

For many of us, theres a point of convergence that happens in your late 20s or 30s, or even 40s, and you cannot predict it from the onset but if you keep on developing your skills and relationships and paying attention to where your strengths lie you will find or create a dream job. It may not be out there, you may not be able to identify it in an example. I had to create it for myself and I think thats becoming true and true even more.

For people that are multi-passionate you may have a day job that pays the bills and give it your very best, but also give yourself permission to take classes or do projects on the side and engage in your other passions as well even if you arent getting paid for it so you can discover what most lights you up.

In the book, Forleo talks about her struggles with becoming a boss for the first time and hiring an assistant. It didnt go very well. She was so used to doing everything herself that she found it hard to delegate or even justify spending the money on an assistant but looking back she learned to be a little less tough on her self:

Be kind and gentle with yourself. Youre not gonna be great at it at first. All of us suck when we become a boss. To have that self-compassion is crucial. She says the way she figured out how to be a better boss was by writing down what she was bad at. I love writing in journals because when you write things down you can identify a solution, for example, Im really terrible at communicating and delegating.

Im not really good at setting deadlines but when you see all that on the page you have your action list for what to work on. You may know intuitively what to work on but who do I know thats a really good delegator? Or is there a podcast on that I can listen to? Make a punch list for yourself from your journaling and taking those little micro-actions for yourself each day can help improve your own skillset as a boss is how you get better.

Forleo is a huge proponent of writing things down in order to provide life clarity:

There is something incredibly profound that happens when you put actual pen to paper rather than typing digitally. Studies show that we actually retain information better when we write with our hands. And on a broader skill writing with our hands slows us down. We usually think more concretely and think deeper truths. You dont slow down when you are typing to get to the root of the issue. The exercise in and of itself of putting pen to paper can be quite enlightening

As for what gets her through the day, the list is rather simple but quite innovative:

This one for me is pretty essential because I have a very active mind. Its very hard to get that thing to shut off. Meditation is a lifesaver for me. There are so many different forms out there and just finding a practice that works for you and clearing my mental cache and helping me feel more rooted clearly and calmly and effectively.

Physical movement is huge for me because I do spend a lot of time in front of screens running a digital business. Apps that have 7-minute workouts work wonders if I cant get to the gym or a class. Ill do a workout right in my kitchen in my normal clothes with my body. Movement is crucial.

I need to have connection time with people I love. Whether its my partner, Josh, of 16 years or jumping on Skype with a friend. I need an emotional relational connection.

In the book, Forleo writes a lot about why our overwhelming need to be perfect can be a real downfall. It needs to be viewed in a different way:

Perfectionism can take you off track. Did I make progress and by progress did you learn something? Did you move the needle and in the process did you discover something thats useful to you? Did you move the project ahead even by an inch?

When we measure by progress instead of making something perfect, which doesnt even really exist because weve all got our opinions on what something perfect is, all youre going for is just a little bit of progress then a lot more joy will come in. The other piece is the fear of failure.

Generally speaking, failure is an incredibly short-sighted concept. Its like going to the movies, youre halfway through and the characters hit this main point of conflict and then you get up and walk out. Oh, they failed, they were horrible. You have no idea where that story went. This is absolutely true for most of us in our lives. If we cut ourselves off and declare ourselves a failure midway through the story, its not gonna work.

Something to think about. Dont give up on your story at the halfway point.

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Self-made millionaire CEO Marie Forleo on the 3 things that get her through the day - Ladders

Payments firm GoCardless is driving the use of business intelligence (BI) across its business through self-service software. The fintech firm will use software from Looker which Googleannounced it was acquiring in June 2019 to give its workforce of about 350 access to self-service BI report generation.

London-headquartered GoCardless was founded in 2011, andcollects direct debits for businessesranging from very large organisations, such as accounting software supplier Xero, right down to small window-cleaning businesses. It sets up direct debits for customers, does things like know your customer (KYC) checks, and works with the bank to receive payments.

Jon Palmer, head of business intelligence at GoCardless, says that before using Looker, staff would use either a combination of legacy tools for self-services which he said was often inaccurate, hard to scale and difficult to keep within obligations or they would raise tickets with the business intelligence team, made up of 20 people, to have their questions answered.

We would get requests from all across the business, says Palmer. We are a very data-driven company from the CEO down, and there is enormous interest in what is happening across all functions, whether that is risk analysis or revenue drivers.

Palmer says that from the day he started at the company, about 18 months ago, the process of replacing the legacy process began. I was brought in to find a different way of doing this, he says.

The options available to the company were to persist with legacy tools and processes, scale the team with the business, or look for another technology. It chose Looker, which provides self-service BI functionality. This was the main attraction for Palmer, who had used the software in the past.

Everyone is asking us for a lot of stuff, and that is now available through Looker, says Palmer. We wanted to deliver a single truth across the company not just to people but to applications.

The software is hosted by GoCardless, although there is an option for it to be hosted by Looker. Its used across the business, and being a tech-driven company, the IT department is a major user, with access to services to test websites, monitor DevOps processes and test the effects of using machine learning models.

A year after its introduction, 95% of staff are using Looker, with 75% using the service in a meaningful way on a monthly basis. The company is seeing 7,500 Looker queries on average every day. Less than a third of staff would have had access to any kind of service like this, says Palmer.

The companys financial planning and analysis team saved four days per month by using Looker to automate the process of data analysis at the executive and board level. This freed up time for the team and data analysts supporting this process on a regular basis.

At the top of the company, GoCardless executives can pose questions about the take-up of its services when services or regions of operation are launched.

Training was provided by looker to ensure staff take-up levels were high. The Looker team has been integral in on-boarding and training our employees to enable a self-help culture across the company, he says.The levels of engagement testify to its ease of use.

Palmer says many BI tools are not user friendly for most workers because they focus on dashboards that require the staff to find all answers. With Looker, you ask a question and the answer leads to another question, he says. It enables users to drill down and bring in more ingredients.

The high take-up has freed up the analysts to focus on business strategy. Separately, the company recently moved from an IBM infrastructure as a service to Googles cloud platform. Its infrastructure handles about 850m in payments per month, and more than 42,000 merchants worldwide use the service. Most of these (40,000) are in the UK, but GoCardless is targeting international expansion.

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GoCardless gives 95% of its staff business intelligence at their fingertips - ComputerWeekly.com

I spent my adolescence in a terrible hurry to read all the books, see all the movies, listen to all the music, look at everything in all the museums. That pursuit required more effort back then, when nothing was streaming and everything had to be hunted down, bought or borrowed. But those changes arent what this essay is about. Culturally ravenous young people have always been insufferable and never unusual, even though they tend to invest a lot in being different in aspiring (or pretending) to something deeper, higher than the common run. Viewed with the chastened hindsight of adulthood, their seriousness shows its ridiculous side, but the longing that drives it is no joke. Its a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience of a particular kind. Two kinds, really: the specific experience of encountering a book or work of art and also the future experience, the state of perfectly cultivated being, that awaits you at the end of the search. Once youve read everything, then at last you can begin.

2 Furious consumption is often described as indiscriminate, but the point of it is always discrimination. It was on my parents bookshelves, amid other emblems of midcentury, middle-class American literary taste and intellectual curiosity, that I found a book with a title that seemed to offer something I desperately needed, even if (or precisely because) it went completely over my head. Against Interpretation. No subtitle, no how-to promise or self-help come-on. A 95-cent Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of the author, Susan Sontag.

There is no doubt that the picture was part of the books allure the angled, dark-eyed gaze, the knowing smile, the bobbed hair and buttoned-up coat but the charisma of the title shouldnt be underestimated. It was a statement of opposition, though I couldnt say what exactly was being opposed. Whatever interpretation turned out to be, I was ready to enlist in the fight against it. I still am, even if interpretation, in one form or another, has been the main way Ive made my living as an adult. Its not fair to blame Susan Sontag for that, though I do.

3 Against Interpretation, a collection of articles from the 1960s reprinted from various journals and magazines, mainly devoted to of-the-moment texts and artifacts (Jean-Paul Sartres Saint Genet, Jean-Luc Godards Vivre Sa Vie, Jack Smiths Flaming Creatures), modestly presents itself as case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of Sontags own sensibility. Really, though, it is the episodic chronicle of a mind in passionate struggle with the world and itself.

Sontags signature is ambivalence. Against Interpretation (the essay), which declares that to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world in order to set up a shadow world of meanings, is clearly the work of a relentlessly analytical, meaning-driven intelligence. In a little more than 10 pages, she advances an appeal to the ecstasy of surrender rather than the protocols of exegesis, made in unstintingly cerebral terms. Her final, mic-drop declaration In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art deploys abstraction in the service of carnality.

4 Its hard for me, after so many years, to account for the impact Against Interpretation had on me. It was first published in 1966, the year of my birth, which struck me as terribly portentous. It brought news about books I hadnt hadnt yet! read and movies I hadnt heard about and challenged pieties I had only begun to comprehend. It breathed the air of the 60s, a momentous time I had unforgivably missed.

But I kept reading Against Interpretation following it with Styles of Radical Will, On Photography and Under the Sign of Saturn, books Sontag would later deprecate as juvenilia for something else. For the style, you could say (she wrote an essay called On Style). For the voice, I guess, but thats a tame, trite word. It was because I craved the drama of her ambivalence, the tenacity of her enthusiasm, the sting of her doubt. I read those books because I needed to be with her. Is it too much to say that I was in love with her? Who was she, anyway?

5 Years after I plucked Against Interpretation from the living-room shelf, I came across a short story of Sontags called Pilgrimage. One of the very few overtly autobiographical pieces Sontag ever wrote, this lightly fictionalized memoir, set in Southern California in 1947, recalls an adolescence that I somehow suspect myself of having plagiarized a third of a century later. I felt I was slumming in my own life, Sontag writes, gently mocking and also proudly affirming the serious, voracious girl she used to be. The pilgrimage in question, undertaken with a friend named Merrill, was to Thomas Manns house in Pacific Palisades, where that venerable giant of German Kultur had been incongruously living while in exile from Nazi Germany.

The funniest and truest part of the story is young Susans shame and dread at the prospect of paying the call. Oh, Merrill, how could you? she melodramatically exclaims when she learns he has arranged for a teatime visit to the Mann residence. The second-funniest and truest part of the story is the disappointment Susan tries to fight off in the presence of a literary idol who talks like a book review. The encounter makes a charming anecdote with 40 years of hindsight, but it also proves that the youthful instincts were correct. Why would I want to meet him? she wondered. I had his books.

6 I never met Susan Sontag. Once when I was working late answering phones and manning the fax machine in the offices of The New York Review of Books, I took a message for Robert Silvers, one of the magazines editors. Tell him Susan Sontag called. Hell know why. (Because it was his birthday.) Another time I caught a glimpse of her sweeping, swanning, promenading or maybe just walking through the galleries of the Frick.

Much later, I was commissioned by this magazine to write a profile of her. She was about to publish Regarding the Pain of Others, a sequel and corrective to her 1977 book On Photography. The furor she sparked with a few paragraphs written for The New Yorker after the Sept. 11 attacks words that seemed obnoxiously rational at a time of horror and grief had not yet died down. I felt I had a lot to say to her, but the one thing I could not bring myself to do was pick up the phone. Mostly I was terrified of disappointment, mine and hers. I didnt want to fail to impress her; I didnt want to have to try. The terror of seeking her approval, and the certainty that in spite of my journalistic pose I would be doing just that, were paralyzing. Instead of a profile, I wrote a short text that accompanied a portrait by Chuck Close. I didnt want to risk knowing her in any way that might undermine or complicate the relationship we already had, which was plenty fraught. I had her books.

7 After Sontag died in 2004, the focus of attention began to drift away from her work and toward her person. Not her life so much as her self, her photographic image, her way of being at home and at parties anywhere but on the page. Her son, David Rieff, wrote a piercing memoir about his mothers illness and death. Annie Leibovitz, Sontags partner, off and on, from 1989 until her death, released a portfolio of photographs unsparing in their depiction of her cancer-ravaged, 70-year-old body. There were ruminations by Wayne Koestenbaum, Phillip Lopate and Terry Castle about her daunting reputation and the awe, envy and inadequacy she inspired in them. Sempre Susan, a short memoir by Sigrid Nunez, who lived with Sontag and Rieff for a while in the 1970s, is the masterpiece of the I knew Susan minigenre and a funhouse-mirror companion to Sontags own Pilgrimage. Its about what can happen when you really get to know a writer, which is that you lose all sense of what or who it is you really know, including yourself.

8 In 2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontags longtime publisher, issued Reborn, the first of two volumes so far culled from nearly 100 notebooks Sontag filled from early adolescence into late middle age. Because of their fragmentary nature, these journal entries arent intimidating in the way her more formal nonfiction prose could be, or abstruse in the manner of most of her pre-1990s fiction. They seem to offer an unobstructed window into her mind, documenting her intellectual anxieties, existential worries and emotional upheavals, along with everyday ephemera that proves to be almost as captivating. Lists of books to be read and films to be seen sit alongside quotations, aphorisms, observations and story ideas. Lovers are tantalizingly represented by a single letter (I.; H; C.). You wonder if Sontag hoped, if she knew, that you would be reading this someday the intimate journal as a literary form is a recurring theme in her essays and you wonder whether that possibility undermines the guilty intimacy of reading these pages or, on the contrary, accounts for it.

9 A new biography by Benjamin Moser Sontag: Her Life and Work, published last month shrinks Sontag down to life size, even as it also insists on her significance. What mattered about Susan Sontag was what she symbolized, he concludes, having studiously documented her love affairs, her petty cruelties and her lapses in personal hygiene.

I must say I find the notion horrifying. A woman whose great accomplishments were writing millions of words and reading who knows how many millions more no exercise in Sontagiana can fail to mention the 15,000-book library in her Chelsea apartment has at last been decisively captured by what she called the image-world, the counterfeit reality that threatens to destroy our apprehension of the actual world.

You can argue about the philosophical coherence, the political implications or the present-day relevance of this idea (one of the central claims of On Photography), but its hard to deny that Sontag currently belongs more to images than to words. Maybe its inevitable that after Sontags death, the literary persona she spent a lifetime constructing that rigorous, serious, impersonal self has been peeled away, revealing the person hiding behind the words. The unhappy daughter. The mercurial mother. The variously needy and domineering lover. The loyal, sometimes impossible friend. In the era of prestige TV, we may have lost our appetite for difficult books, but we relish difficult characters, and the biographical Sontag brave and imperious, insecure and unpredictable surely fits the bill.

10 Interpretation, according to Sontag, is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. And biography, by the same measure, is the revenge of research upon the intellect. The life of the mind is turned into the life, a coffin full of rattling facts and spectral suppositions, less an invitation to read or reread than a handy, bulky excuse not to.

The point of this essay, which turns out not to be as simple as I thought it would be, is to resist that tendency. I cant deny the reality of the image or the symbolic cachet of the name. I dont want to devalue the ways Sontag serves as a talisman and a culture hero. All I really want to say is that Susan Sontag mattered because of what she wrote.

11 Or maybe I should just say thats why she matters to me. In Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nunez describes Sontag as:

... the opposite of Thomas Bernhards comic possessive thinker, who feeds on the fantasy that every book or painting or piece of music he loves has been created solely for and belongs solely to him, and whose art selfishness makes the thought of anyone else enjoying or appreciating the works of genius he reveres intolerable. She wanted her passions to be shared by all, and to respond with equal intensity to any work she loved was to give her one of her biggest pleasures.

Im the opposite of that. I dont like to share my passions, even if the job of movie critic forces me to do it. I cling to an immature (and maybe also a typically male), proprietary investment in the work I care about most. My devotion to Sontag has often felt like a secret. She was never assigned in any course I took in college, and if her name ever came up while I was in graduate school, it was with a certain condescension. She wasnt a theorist or a scholar but an essayist and a popularizer, and as such a bad fit with the desperate careerism that dominated the academy at the time. In the world of cultural journalism, shes often dismissed as an egghead and a snob. Not really worth talking about, and so I mostly didnt talk about her.

12 Nonetheless, I kept reading, with an ambivalence that mirrored hers. Perhaps her most famous essay certainly among the most controversial is Notes on Camp, which scrutinizes a phenomenon defined by the spirit of extravagance with scrupulous sobriety. The inquiry proceeds from mixed feelings I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it that are heightened rather than resolved, and that curl through the 58 numbered sections of the Notes like tendrils in an Art Nouveau print. In writing about a mode of expression that is overwrought, artificial, frivolous and theatrical, Sontag adopts a style that is the antithesis of all those things.

If some kinds of camp represent a seriousness that fails, then Notes on Camp enacts a seriousness that succeeds. The essay is dedicated to Oscar Wilde, whose most tongue-in-cheek utterances gave voice to his deepest thoughts. Sontag reverses that Wildean current, so that her grave pronouncements sparkle with an almost invisible mischief. The essay is delightful because it seems to betray no sense of fun at all, because its jokes are buried so deep that they are, in effect, secrets.

13 In the chapter of Against Interpretation called Camus Notebooks originally published in The New York Review of Books Sontag divides great writers into husbands and lovers, a sly, sexy updating of older dichotomies (e.g., between Apollonian and Dionysian, Classical and Romantic, paleface and redskin). Albert Camus, at the time beginning his posthumous descent from Nobel laureate and existentialist martyr into the high school curriculum (which is where I found him), is named the ideal husband of contemporary letters. It isnt really a compliment:

Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.

The sexual politics of this formulation are quite something. Reading is female, writing male. The lady reader exists to be seduced or provided for, ravished or served, by a man who is either a scamp or a solid citizen. Camus, in spite of his movie-star good looks (like Sontag, he photographed well), is condemned to husband status. Hes the guy the reader will settle for, who wont ask too many questions when she returns from her flings with Kafka, Cline or Gide. Hes also the one who, more than any of them, inspires love.

14 After her marriage to the sociologist Philip Rieff ended in 1959, most of Sontags serious romantic relationships were with women. The writers whose company she kept on the page were overwhelmingly male (and almost exclusively European). Except for a short piece about Simone Weil and another about Nathalie Sarraute in Against Interpretation and an extensive takedown of Leni Riefenstahl in Under the Sign of Saturn, Sontags major criticism is all about men.

She herself was kind of a husband. Her writing is conscientious, thorough, patient and useful. Authoritative but not scolding. Rigorous, orderly and lucid even when venturing into landscapes of wildness, disruption and revolt. She begins her inquiry into The Pornographic Imagination with the warning that No one should undertake a discussion of pornography before acknowledging the pornographies there are at least three and before pledging to take them on one at a time.

The extravagant, self-subverting seriousness of this sentence makes it a perfect camp gesture. There is also something kinky about the setting of rules and procedures, an implied scenario of transgression and punishment that is unmistakably erotic. Should I be ashamed of myself for thinking that? Of course! Humiliation is one of the most intense and pleasurable effects of Sontags masterful prose. Shes the one in charge.

15 But the rules of the game dont simply dictate silence or obedience on the readers part. What sustains the bond the bondage, if youll allow it is its volatility. The dominant party is always vulnerable, the submissive party always capable of rebellion, resistance or outright refusal.

I often read her work in a spirit of defiance, of disobedience, as if hoping to provoke a reaction. For a while, I thought she was wrong about everything. Against Interpretation was a sentimental and self-defeating polemic against criticism, the very thing she had taught me to believe in. On Photography was a sentimental defense of a shopworn aesthetic ideology wrapped around a superstitious horror at technology. And who cared about Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin anyway? Or about E.M. Cioran or Antonin Artaud or any of the other Euro-weirdos in her pantheon?

Not me! And yet. ... Over the years Ive purchased at least three copies of Under the Sign of Saturn if pressed to choose a favorite Sontag volume, Id pick that one and in each the essay on Canetti, Mind as Passion, is the most dog-eared. Why? Not so I could recommend it to someone eager to learn about the first native Bulgarian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, because Ive never met such a person. Mind as Passion is the best thing Ive ever read about the emotional dynamics of literary admiration, about the way a great writer teaches us how to breathe, about how readerly surrender is a form of self-creation.

16 In a very few cases, the people Sontag wrote about were people she knew: Roland Barthes and Paul Goodman, for example, whose deaths inspired brief appreciations reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn. Even in those elegies, the primary intimacy recorded is the one between writer and reader, and the reader who is also, of course, a writer is commemorating and pursuing a form of knowledge that lies somewhere between the cerebral and the biblical.

Because the intimacy is extended to Sontags reader, the love story becomes an implicit mnage trois. Each essay enacts the effort the dialectic of struggle, doubt, ecstasy and letdown to know another writer, and to make you know him, too. And, more deeply though also more discreetly, to know her.

17 The version of this essay that I least want to write the one that keeps pushing against my resistance to it is the one that uses Sontag as a cudgel against the intellectual deficiencies and the deficient intellectuals of the present. Its almost comically easy to plot a vector of decline from then to now. Why arent the kids reading Canetti? Why dont trade publishers print collections of essays about European writers and avant-garde filmmakers? Sontag herself was not immune to such laments. In 1995, she mourned the death of cinema. In 1996, she worried that the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, unrealistic to most people.

Worse, there are ideas and assumptions abroad in the digital land that look like debased, parodic versions of positions she staked out half a century ago. The new sensibility she heralded in the 60s, dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia, survives in the form of a frantic, algorithm-fueled eclecticism. The popular meme admonishing critics and other designated haters to shut up and let people enjoy things looks like an emoji-friendly update of Against Interpretation, with enjoy things a safer formulation than Sontags erotics of art.

That isnt what she meant, any more than her prickly, nuanced Notes on Camp had much to do with the Instagram-ready insouciance of this years Met Gala, which borrowed the title for its theme. And speaking of the Gram, its ascendance seems to confirm the direst prophecies of On Photography, which saw the unchecked spread of visual media as a kind of ecological catastrophe for human consciousness.

18 In other ways, the Sontag of the 60s and 70s can strike current sensibilities as problematic or outlandish. She wrote almost exclusively about white men. She believed in fixed hierarchies and absolute standards. She wrote at daunting length with the kind of unapologetic erudition that makes people feel bad. Even at her most polemical, she never trafficked in contrarian hot takes. Her name will never be the answer to the standard, time-killing social-media query What classic writer would be awesome on Twitter? The tl;dr of any Sontag essay could only be every word of it.

Sontag was a queer, Jewish woman writer who disdained the rhetoric of identity. She was diffident about disclosing her sexuality. Moser criticizes her for not coming out in the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when doing so might have been a powerful political statement. The political statements that she did make tended to get her into trouble. In 1966, she wrote that the white race is the cancer of human history. In 1982, in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan, she called communism fascism with a human face. After Sept. 11, she cautioned against letting emotion cloud political judgment. Lets by all means grieve together, but lets not be stupid together.

That doesnt sound so unreasonable now, but the bulk of Sontags writing served no overt or implicit ideological agenda. Her agenda a list of problems to be tackled rather than a roster of positions to be taken was stubbornly aesthetic. And that may be the most unfashionable, the most shocking, the most infuriating thing about her.

19 Right now, at what can feel like a time of moral and political emergency, we cling to sentimental bromides about the importance of art. We treat it as an escape, a balm, a vague set of values that exist beyond the ugliness and venality of the market and the state. Or we look to art for affirmation of our pieties and prejudices. It splits the difference between resistance and complicity.

Sontag was also aware of living in emergency conditions, in a world menaced by violence, environmental disaster, political polarization and corruption. But the art she valued most didnt soothe the anguish of modern life so much as refract and magnify its agonies. She didnt read or go to movies, plays, museums or dance performances to retreat from that world but to bring herself closer to it. What art does, she says again and again, is confront the nature of human consciousness at a time of historical crisis, to unmake and redefine its own terms and procedures. It confers a solemn obligation: From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

20 Consciousness is one of her keywords, and she uses it in a way that may have an odd ring to 21st-century ears. Its sometimes invoked now, in a weak sense, as a synonym for the moral awareness of injustice. Its status as a philosophical problem, meanwhile, has been diminished by the rise of cognitive science, which subordinates the mysteries of the human mind to the chemical and physical operations of the brain.

But consciousness as Sontag understands it has hardly vanished, because it names a phenomenon that belongs in ways that escape scientific analysis to both the individual and the species. Consciousness inheres in a single persons private, incommunicable experience, but it also lives in groups, in cultures and populations and historical epochs. Its closest synonym is thought, which similarly dwells both within the walls of a solitary skull and out in the collective sphere.

If Sontags great theme was consciousness, her great achievement was as a thinker. Usually that label is reserved for theorists and system-builders Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud but Sontag doesnt quite belong in that company. Instead, she wrote in a way that dramatized how thinking happens. The essays are exciting not just because of the ideas they impart but because you feel within them the rhythms and pulsations of a living intelligence; they bring you as close to another person as it is possible to be.

21 Under the Sign of Saturn opens in a tiny room in Paris where she has been living for the previous year small bare quarters that answer some need to strip down, to close off for a while, to make a new start with as little as possible to fall back on. Even though, according to Sigrid Nunez, Sontag preferred to have other people around her when she was working, I tend to picture her in the solitude of that Paris room, which I suppose is a kind of physical manifestation, a symbol, of her solitary consciousness. A consciousness that was animated by the products of other minds, just as mine is activated by hers. If shes alone in there, I can claim the privilege of being her only company.

Which is a fantasy, of course. She has had better readers, and I have loved other writers. The metaphors of marriage and possession, of pleasure and power, can be carried only so far. There is no real harm in reading casually, promiscuously, abusively or selfishly. The page is a safe space; every word is a safe word. Your lover might be my husband.

Its only reading. By which I mean: Its everything.

Read more:
How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think - The New York Times

Not a member of Kindle Unlimited yet? Here's your chance to change that. For a limited time, you can get two months of Amazon's all-you-can-read service for free. The subscription service normally costs $9.99 a month, so you're saving $20 with this deal. Back in July, Amazon gave away three months of the service to its Prime members but unlike that offer, this deal does not require you to be a Prime subscriber so anyone can get in on it. This deal also doesn't specifiy that it is for first-time users only, so it's worth giving it a shot even if you have had a previous Kindle Unlimited trial.

Kindle Unlimited gives you access to over a million titles, spanning from technical documents to cookbooks to fantasy novels to nonfiction. Even some audiobooks are included. Need a self-help book? Want to re-read the Harry Potter books for the seventeenth time? It's all there, and it's all free with your membership. You don't need a Kindle or Fire tablet to read, either. Amazon makes it easy to read thanks to its free Kindle reading apps for iOS, Android, PC, and Mac.

With its myriad of titles, Kindle Unlimited could keep you reading non-stop if you wished. You can keep up to ten titles at a time, and when you feel like swapping them out, the process is seamless. After the two months are up, it will renew automatically for the normal rate. You can cancel at any time with no penalties for doing so, though you might find that $10 per month is a great value for all that Kindle Unlimited offers.

Amazon hasn't stated an end date for this offer, but it's not likely to hang around for long so don't miss your chance to explore Kindle Unlimited for yourself!

We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more.

Read the original:
Snag two free months of Amazon Kindle Unlimited for a limited time - Android Central

Updated: May 25, 2018:

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Resist the Urge to Access: the Impact of the Stored Communications Act on Employer Self-Help Tactics - JD Supra

Most Americans will either have to or want to retire one day. With the massive population of baby boomers out there, millions of them already have started their retirement and millions more will be retiring every year for the next decade or more. To have a good retirement generally requires a lifetime of planning, but for millions of Americans there just is not going to be enough in Social Security and basic retirement funds to make those golden years all that golden.

24/7 Wall St. frequently has looked at long-term planning issues around investing and retirement. The good news is that if you are set to retire in the immediate years ahead, there is effectively zero risk that your Social Security benefits will not be there for another decade or two. The bad news for the majority of the population is that most people will not be able to live very well only on Social Security alone. Even adding in retirement funds may not make those golden years all that pleasant without some additional self-help. You need to take action and make an effort to help boost your income and cash available immediately and in the years ahead.

While Social Security is safe for the boomers and elderly, younger generations have very low expectations. Their expectation is that Social Security will not be there for them at all, or if it is there the benefits might be greatly reduced. All this makes it imperative for people of all ages to begin thinking about how to supplement their retirement as early as possible.

Investment advisers commonly tell clients to have saved $1 million, $2 million or more to be able to enjoy retirement. Even if you arent working any longer, those pesky costs from food, insurance, medicine, transportation, clothing, shelter, utilities, bills, vacations and entertainment all will keep adding up every month. We previously provided a basic plan for most ages on how to save that $1 million for retirement, and that is very attainable, but the reality is that most people just arent anywhere close to having saved that much money.

There are some basic issues that need to be considered about funding a proper retirement and taking a reality check about just how golden your future golden years will be. It is assumed that you are going to have some Social Security, if you are already near retirement, but the statistics from government and independent researchers show that an additional retirement account or other savings have to be in place. Here are some basic stats on Social Security, retirement income and so on:

Add all this up and here is what it means ahead for Joe Retiree. Even the maximum monthly Social Security benefit is unlikely to go very far in your retirement, and the average 401(K) and IRA accounts are likely to add only a few thousand dollars per year in income.

Here are 10 simple efforts that can boost your income and give you extra cash to make your retirement really feel like they are the golden years.

Knowing how to time your Social Security payments is a critical part of retirement for most Americans. Your mandated retirement age of 65 to 67 depends on what year you were born, and the SSA website shows a table of scheduled benefits. Some people choose to start taking their Social Security benefits at 62 years of age, while others choose to delay their benefits until age 70.

That SSA table shows a breakdown of how much more you get per month for delaying or how much less you receive for starting early. For anyone born 1960 or later, the full retirement age is 67 years old. Taking Social Security for those born 1960 or later at age 62 reduces monthly payments by 30% (to $700 for each $1,000 eligible at full age), and delaying Social Security until age 70 turns a $1,000 benefit into roughly $1,280. Taking money sooner or later depends on needs, lifestyle, how long each person reasonably expects to live and many other factors.

Dont forget: if you start taking Social Security before the mandatory age of 70, you can always choose to interrupt the benefits and let those monthly benefits grow.

Originally posted here:
10 Easy Steps to Boost Your Income and Cash in Retirement - 24/7 Wall St.

After a 20 percent increase in use last year, the Rollins Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) has adjusted its treatment methods to accommodate more students.

The new emphasis on group therapy and a switch from weekly to bi-weekly individual appointments, leaves some students feeling concerned.

In the past, students began individual talk therapy at their first appointment. In this new model of care delivery, students will first attend a 30-minute consultation. They will work one-on-one with a counselor to design an individualized care plan and identify their needs and goals for therapy. In this way, resources can be delegated more efficiently.

Additionally, one-on-one therapy is offered on a biweekly rather than weekly basis, and group therapy and workshops are emphasized and integrated into individual plans.

Dr. Connie Briscoe, director of the Wellness Center, said that the changes are part of an initiative to move to a stepped care model of mental health service provision.

This approach is considered one of the most appropriate and cost-effective models for college campuses. A patients care plan is adjusted based on the severity of their mental health issues.

Briscoe said, We spent time at other college counseling centers talking to other people who are using a variety of different models and felt that because we are a highly individualized campus and were all about relationships, the stepped care model really fits our campus and our culture best.

The individualized care plans include self-help resources, group therapy, therapeutic workshops, biweekly individual talk therapy appointments, campus and community resources such as Student & Family Care. It can also include referrals to off-campus therapy, as well as any necessary specialized treatment options.

Were matching the needs of the students to the services much more intentionally, and so were seeing that students are receiving a much broader range of services, said Briscoe.

One of the consequences of this need-matching plan is that many students will have less one-on-one appointments, unless a student is receiving specialized treatment or experiencing a crisis.

Anecia Inbornone (22), a client of the CAPS program, said,I know that for me, if Im in a group setting, Im not as vulnerable as I would be in like a one-on-one session, and I know thats probably very true for many people; so, although its an alternative, I dont think that fixes the problem.

Students are not upheld to the same code of ethics that requires counselors to maintain students confidentiality. Therefore, in group therapy and workshops, students must place their trust not only in their counselors but also in their fellow students to keep their personal information protected.

A survey conducted at the end of last year indicated that Rollins students would prefer to see a larger number and variety of workshops in addition to an increase in the availability of individual CAPS appointments.

Briscoe said that the CAPS program is not meant to be used as a long-term individual therapy service.

If students really want and need long-term intensive individual therapy, something we dont have here, we can always work with that student to provide them with resources in the community where they can go out and get that type of care, said Briscoe.

However, many students at Rollins rely on the schools mental health services because appointments are free and on-campus. Some students feel that there are not enough individual appointments available.

Kendall Clarke (21) has been using the CAPS program since the fall of her sophomore year. She said she benefited most from the relationship she built with her counselor in individual therapy.

A lot of people use CAPS as a replacement for a therapist, and I get that its counseling and not official therapy but we are college students and our money and our mobility are really limited, Clarke said.

I wanted to go to a professional therapist, but I dont have a car, and I dont have the money to be paying a Lyft or Uber every week to pay for a therapist, so CAPS kind of is the only thing I can get to help with some of my mental health issues, she said.

From 2017 to 2018, faculty and staff referred students to CAPS at an increased rate of 300 percent. Last spring, roughly 350 Rollins students were utilizing CAPS.

From 2018 to 2019, the number of students using CAPS increased by 20 percent, raising the average wait time for a CAPS appointment from 6.5 days in 2018 to two weeks in the spring of 2019.

In August 2018, the Wellness Center was awarded the Garrett Lee Smith Campus Suicide Prevention Grant, a federal government grant matched by Rollins and totaling over $300,000 distributed over a three-year period.

Besides that, the Wellness Center has not requested any additional funding from Rollins, but Briscoe said she is always hoping for more resources.

However, there would be challenges along the way. Briscoe said, If we were to get a lot more staff, where would we put them? We only have this one building.

As this new model is implemented, Briscoe remains hopeful that the changes will be beneficial to a majority of students on campus.

I think it cant be anything but really positive for our students to have more options and opportunities and better ways to tailor our resources to their needs, said Briscoe. I wouldnt have put the model together if I didnt think that it was a more effective model than the one we had in the past.

Students in need of mental health assistance are encouraged to contact the Wellness Center. No matter the time of day or availability at the Wellness Center, students in need of someone to talk to are encouraged to call the 24/7 crisis phone line at (833) 848-1761.

Additionally, students may utilize the WellTrack self-therapy app for free by registering with their student email address.

Visit link:
Wellness Center alters therapy options - Sandspur

Twenty years ago, McKinsey predicted that the success of organizations would primarily depend on their ability to identify, develop, and retain top talent. Those employees are responsible for most of their employers productivity, revenues, profits, etc., and are therefore also the key to outperforming their competitors.

Today, few companies would disagree. There is also ample scientific evidencethat in any workgroup or team, a small but vital number of people have a disproportionately high impact on that units performance and success.

The last two decades of academic researchreveals that these indispensable individuals are far more similar across jobs, cultures, and industries than most people think. They havethree major traits that set them apart.They tend to be smart and curious, which means they learn faster and better than others. They tend to have better people skills, so they are more effective in their interpersonal relations. They are more driven and hard-working than their peers, which explains their higher productivity rates.

But one critical dimension of talent appears to have been mostly forgotten and is surprisingly absent from companies competency frameworksand high-potentialmodels. Its importance is such that it can amplify or extinguish any other aspect of talent, including the benefits of learning ability, people skills, and work ethic.

That trait is self-control, and it explains why some people are much better able to resist temptations and make short-term sacrifices to pursue more meaningful long-term goals, not just at work, but in any area of life. Without self-control, every other virtue, skill, or ability is rendered futile, as any significant accomplishment starts with the ability to manage yourself. As Plato said: The first and best victory is to conquer self.

Scientific research suggests there are five key reasons for the critical importance of self-control in the workplace.

We live in an age of information overload and ubiquitous digital distractions. And as Herbert Simon noted, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Academic research shows that individuals with higher levels of self-control are better able to ignore distractions, which enables them to concentrate more and achieve higher levels of performance.

Curiosity is a sought-after trait by many top organizations, including Google and Amazon. But the type of curiosity they seek aligns with what psychologists call the bright sideof curiosity. That means those people can be so deeply immersed in a subject that they are able to develop superior levels of expertise and skill that provide a competitive advantage to both the employee and the employer. Unleashing this positive aspect of curiosity and key knowledge driver requires shutting down its dark side. That is the short-term glut that pushes individuals to consume trivial content, as a short-term cure to boredom, and a lazy alternative to focus and concentration. The more self-control you have, the less time you will waste binging on random YouTube clips or looking at the Facebook photos of your neighbors cat having breakfast.

As Daniel Markovits highlights in his excellent new book, The Meritocracy Trap, we live in an age of unprecedented competition for jobs and career success, where even the most highly skilled and employable individuals are pushed into longer and more intense working hours. In this ever more complex and unpredictable world, nobody can succeed unless they are able to marshal the necessary levels of resilience and stress tolerance. People with higher levels of self-control are more likely to be in this category.

As a recent meta-analysis shows, employees personality is as important a predictor of their level of engagement and job satisfaction as the actual job they are in. This means that one of the best ways to ensure that your workforce is engaged is to hire people with a predisposition to enjoy work and be enthusiastic about their careers. Self-control is one of the key traits that distinguish employees who are more engaged at work.

Self-control is a strong predictor of ethical and prosocial behavior. When employees who lack self-control are promoted into management or leadership roles, they misbehave. Sadly, this happens all too often, which explains harassment and the prevalence of leaders who engage in other reckless, entitled, and antisocial behaviors at work. Incidentally, if we selected leaders on the basis of their self-control, the majority of them would be female.

When you look for talented people, focus not just on what they know or their likability. Pay attention to their ability to control their urges and keep their impulses in check. This evidence-based recommendation is in stark contrast with much of the popular self-help advice you will find online on just being yourself and bringing your authentic self to work.

Self-control is as underrated as authenticity is overrated. Theres no need to go against ones values and principles, but the most productive and rewarding version of you will require a healthy degree of restraint and self-censorship, and that can only be achieved if you exercise self-control.

View post:
the most under-rated aspect of talent - Fast Company

The world around is being cluttered with too many screens and India hasnt been slouching on that front either. An overload of screens, which was once considered an assault on our senses, has now become a part of our everyday lives. Moving beyond TV and computers or laptops, we are always connected through smartphones, often carrying more than one to segregate professional from personal. But thats not all! When running out of cash, the ATM screen is our go-to resource. At airports, we would rather get the boarding pass from a self-help kiosk and drop the baggage at the counter instead of bearing a long queue.

I sometimes pause and wonder How many screens per second are we living." With every passing day, the world around us is being increasingly populated with screens. No matter where we go, the black mirror follows usat workplaces, home, indoors and outdoors, buses, trains, airports, there is simply no escaping now. However, one may halt and wonder, what does this explosion of the screen mean for the evolution of laptops? From clamshell designs to athletic architectures, laptops have certainly come a long way. Yet, the future may hold true integration of multiple screens, with a pursuit to de-clutter and help multi-taskers prioritize better.

It was 1982 when Grid Systems, under the leadership of John Ellenby, popularly known as the godfather" of laptops, launched the first-ever laptop as we recognize todayclamshell and portable. Named the Compass, the laptop was, however, noting like a modern-day notebook. Despite the clamshell design, the laptop was heavy (weighing 5 kilos) and expensive (a present-day equivalent of over $20,000).

However, the Compass led to Apple, which released its first portable laptop in 1989, which may have been priced lesser but was still questionably portable, weighing 7.2 kg. It was the 90s when some other popular product ranges greeted us, for instance, the 1992 ThinkPad, which is still an active product line. It folded the screen at the top and keyboard at the bottom neatly in half, also offering TrackPoint allowing users to operate the mouse on the screen. In 1996, Toshiba Libretto may have been the first entrant to the subnotebook category, owing to its sleek design. With the dimensions of a novel, the laptop weighed only 840 g, garnering immense popularity within the market for its industry-leading easily portable attribute.

While tracing the evolution of laptops, a standout aspect has been the consistency in the design of laptops architecture. While the machines have surely shrunk, the year 2018 saw the growth of the thin and light" category priced at an affordable range. But not much has shifted in the age-old clamshell design.

We made a leap towards the weird and wonderful design of laptops when Windows 8 debuted over half a decade ago. It led to the rise of interesting designs, noteworthy to mention the Yoga laptop range and other athletic designs from the leading OEMs. However, the quirky designs have come and gone, without defining the generation. The industry, thus, in the need of a serious makeover and to de-clutter the proliferation of multiple screens, is perhaps headed what may be a significant epoch in the laptop space the advent of dual-screen laptops. Brands are tinkering with the idea of adding another secondary screen to the traditional design.

A dual-screen laptop allows the user to perhaps check the work emails on a secondary screen while focusing on the major task at hand on the primary one.

Professionals can develop the PowerPoint presentation on the main screen, while constantly brainstorming on the messenger app opened on the secondary screen. Gamers can utilize the dual offering to focus on the high-adrenaline action-packed formats and leverage the secondary screen to take stock of their arsenal, zoom in on the map, or simply stream music online. In a nutshell, dual-screen laptops are here to make life easier for the multi-tasking clan and take some pressure off from having to utilize multiple screens. They would also solve the conundrum for users to select between gaming devices and work laptops.

With their razor-sharp focus on delivering high horsepower to enable productivity and multi-tasking, the dual-screen offerings are the torch-bearers of an integrated and de-cluttered future.

In days to come, laptops will continue to get more powerful and play a significant role in the lives of users. The high-powered machines would empower users to venture into critical tasks such as 3D modelling, animation programs, and more. With the machines getting ready to take charge of critical roles, the market for consumer notebooks and laptops will only get enriched with superior and disruptive offerings.

Arnold Su is BDM, consumer notebooks & ROG, Asus India

Excerpt from:
Opinion: The evolution of laptops from bulky machines to compact, dual-screens - Livemint