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Author Archives: William Eaton

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You think you can multitask? Think again!

February 5, 2015 by William Eaton

        In 2009 I became aware of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the effectiveness of multitasking by Professor Clifford Nass, Department of Communication at Stanford. Nass was one of the first academics to study and warn of the dangers of multitasking and decline of social interaction. He and his colleagues at Stanford devised three tests to study the effects of multitasking—an increasingly prevalent activity of the young. They compared chronically […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz • Tags: science, technology

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Snowden, Foucault, Microsoft

January 31, 2015 by William Eaton

This piece is excerpted from a longer essay: “Snowden, Jesus” (click for pdf). When faced with the canvas that Edward Snowden, his colleagues and others have—with not a little idealism and courage—painted for all eyes to see, it is possible to feel frightened, panicked even, and helpless. Most everything we are doing with the aid of electronic devices—the places we are going, the words we are using, the people we are contacting—all this is being constantly tracked. Not only have […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Citizenfour, Foucault, privacy

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Catch-22 in the 21st Century

January 30, 2015 by William Eaton

Although set on a US Air force base on a small island in the Mediterranean during World War Two, Catch-22 is a satirical attack on the workings of modern bureaucracy that is still relevant today. It points out very clearly, and with great accuracy, how organizational goals get diverted and perverted by the ferocious competition for power among those at the top. It shows how this competition wastes time, resources, and ultimately human lives, as ambition drives mediocre men to […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: literature

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Who are you?

January 29, 2015 by William Eaton

“Who are you?” is the question a pilgrimage demands of the pilgrim. In this case, well-known European comedic entertainer, Hape Kerkeling, author of I’m Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago. Herr Kerkeling walked the Camino de Francés, the most popular of many “caminos” — roads in Spanish — to the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago de Campostela in the Province of Galicia. Kerkeling began his 775 km trek on June 9, 2001.  The Camino […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR

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A Funny Poem About the Pope

January 27, 2015 by William Eaton

If you read poetry, you probably know who Neruda is. However, there is a Chilean poet called Nicanor Parra who might be better. He is Neruda’s near-contemporary and is still living, aged 100. Parra said of Neruda: “let the birds sing, man talks.” Because I just encountered Parra’s “anti-poetry” and am in open-mouthed awe, I will be featuring his work for the next few weeks. Below is a funny poem about the pope that I liked for its humor, but also […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, poetry, reading, writing

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The American Splitting Experiment

January 24, 2015 by William Eaton

  In The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein splits Americans of that recent period into two “tribes.” One comprised the suspicious circles, which had once been small, but now were exceptionally broad, who considered the self-evident lesson of the 1960s and the low, dishonest war that defined the decade to be the imperative to question authority, unsettle ossified norms, and expose dissembling leaders. The other tribe “found another lesson to be self-evident: never […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: American Dream, American history, class warfare, Declaration of Independence, History, Lewis Mumford, money, politics

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Does Brokeback Mountain need a happy ending?

January 23, 2015 by William Eaton

In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Annie Proulx said that she regretted writing Brokeback Mountain. She said she wished she’d never written the story, and that it had “just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out.” This was because of the way readers — especially male ones — kept hassling her about the ending. It should’ve been a happy ending, they claim. Proulx says: “They all begin the same way – I’m […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: film, homosexuality, literature, writing

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The Cheevers and the Baldwins

January 18, 2015 by William Eaton

[email_link] Found at the Y, in a New York Times Magazine piece about Mary Cheever: According to him [the fiction writer John Cheever], their issues [marital conflicts] are myriad: He wants to have sex all the time, for example, and she wants to have sex almost none of the time. He acknowledges, in fairness to Mary, that he is quite often impotent—ostensibly because he has a ferocious appetite for alcohol and perhaps because he finds himself lusting steadily, irrepressibly, after men. Here, in […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bette Davis, Freud, Hemingway, James Baldwin, John Cheever, New York Times, reading, sex

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Amnesia: hackers and subversion in Australia

January 16, 2015 by William Eaton

[email_link] Amnesia begins with a hacker known as Angel. She releases a computer worm which opens the gates of CIA-sponsored prisons around the world. Many of these are in Australia. Some suspected terrorists manage to escape; others are shot by prison guards. Angel goes on the run. Her mother, a well-known actress, asks investigative journalist Felix Moore to write the girl’s life story. The idea is to create a wave of public sympathy for her and help her avoid extradition […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, crime, History, literature, politics

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