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Protecting our privacy and searching for beauty (Buscaba la Belleza)

Two very different book reads, plus some podcasts and articles from the week.

May 13, 2023

Books

Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data by Carissa Veliz

 

We all know we put a lot of data out in the world and have minimal privacy. The scale of it laid out here in this book by Carissa Veliz still feels startling to read it all in one place. The rise of the internet with its business model largely dependent on surveillance capitalism, the reaction to 9/11, the lack of security and privacy guarantees - they all add up and take a toll in ways obvious and less so.

Threats to national security, threats to democracy, threats to our financial security or the privacy of something shared with one person via a text or WhatsApp or on social media, threats to individual safety.

One particularly revelatory passage was on differences in the Netherlands and France and national identity documents that tracked religion (or didn’t) in the years leading up to WWII. The Dutch had the highest death rate of Jews in occupied Europe: 73%. France, which had more privacy with regards to religion, had a 25% death rate among Jews - still a staggering number of people murdered, but hundreds of thousands of lives saved.

Buscaba la belleza por Jesús Terré

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Es un acto de valentía abrirse tu alma y tu corazón al mundo. Aunque a veces puede ser igual de difícil o más revelárselos a nosotros mismos. Hacerlo de manera tan poética, con la belleza y el dolor entretejidos, como Jesús Terrés hace en “Buscaba la Belleza” es todo un logro.

Cita a Borges en decir que el peor pecado fue no ser feliz, y dice que hizo algo aún peor: “negarse a poder sentir nada.”

Seguro que todos lo hacemos a veces, pero intentar evitar el dolor a todo coste es evitar vivir, condenarnos a momentos de felicidad pasajeros y no duraderos.

Escribe de su primer amor, Lucía: “me enamoré por su entrega tan desmedida y tan visceral a la vida.” 

Vivir así es una decisión.

Muchos te dirán, guárdate más, no te abres tan fácilmente. Pero esto es huir del amor porque tu corazón podría romper en mil piezas.

Dejarnos caer por la “mirada sobre el mundo” de otro es parte de la magia, parte de la montaña rusa, parte de vivir plenamente.

Articles

Bookshop thriving in the days of Amazon

The economics of thinness. Specifically for women, a link between higher income and being thinner. Sad.

Great piece on shutting down one’s startup and losing your identity as a founder.

The El Rocio pilgrimage in Andalucía, Spain. Featured in the New York Times

Amazing illustrations and data visualizations on mapping storms at sea

Honoring a 101-year-old man who missed his college graduation 80 years ago while fighting in WWII

Returning from a trip overseas in Japan - the country with lowest rates of gun violence - to U.S. violence by Karen Attiah

Considering AI and how to regulate it 

Podcasts

Ezra Klein show on loneliness

Hidden Brain on misaligned incentives

Alex Rodriguez on Twenty Minute VC and growth