2 pounds to take away valid ideas

Dear readers,

If the retail price of a book was fixed to the number of high quality ideas it contained, the two books below would sell for clumsy sums. And by the same logic, a book that contained no ideas or – worse – lazy or not supported owed the reader’s money for the wasted time. This is my platform. Vote Molly for the president.

–Molly

Why Red Bull sell 12.7 billion cans of energy drinks last year? Why is it a common and accepted practice to follow its daily steps? Why did a German chemist named Wilhelm Weichardt tried to invent a vaccine against fatigue at the beginning of the 20th century and-especially-if he succeeded, where can we present our arms for immediate injection?

These questions are answered in “The Human Motor”, would only be implicitly for the first two. Rabinbach, who died recently at the age of 79, had higher concerns than the state of the Red Bull market share.

He began his dazzling study with the observation that certain scientific discoveries of the 19th century on energy transformed the conceptions of work. The first two laws of thermodynamics, maintains Rabinbach, has exerted a magnetic metaphorical force, leading workers to be considered as machines to convert energy to output. The difference between machines and bodies, of course, is that our spongy meat wraps are not designed for work constantly.

This idea of ​​the body of the body as the machine led to a new obsession with fatigue, which has become the great enemy of productivity. (The previous great enemy had been idleness. The great enemy of today, surely, is distraction. These words are capitalized to indicate that we are, as they say, in the presence of constructions.)

A criticism of the book in this newspaper complained that “Mr. Rabinbach is not an excellent stylist. I don’t agree. His stylistic fulfillments are at the connection of remote points and the discovery of rare sources jewels – although I don’t have complaints about his adjectives either.

About this fatigue vaccine. Weichardt ultimately failed to concoct one, although his research took place impressively to the point where a class of German children without distrust was pulverized with an isolated substance during rats tests. Symptoms of fatigue can be temporarily masked – Red Bull helps – but, alas, they cannot be reversed.

Read if you wish: Walter Benjamin, “The Road to Wellville” by TC Boyle, complaining about your work.
Available on: University of California Press, or various bookstores and online and land libraries.

“Trying to stay motionless”, by Jenny Diski

Voyage / Memory, 2006,

I recommend Diski to all my favorite grumpy people as a gesture of affection and respect, because it offers the best proof that the crank and love do not only coexist but prosper in concert. This is an important reminder, given the implacable devaluation of our time as hearing impaired as a human condition. (One day, I will write an essay on this subject, unless one of you is fighting me.)

Moinque is not a synonym of rudeness. It is a state of reaction which, I risk, results from three things: 1) the maintenance of rigorously high standards; 2) be tirelessly expressive about them; and 3) lacking in grazing constraint. For Diski, who died in 2016, the grace was a source of comedy and oneself, two qualities which are densely present in this story of the roaming of New Zealand in Lapland in the English countryside. When Diski has traveled, she did not look for an adventure or stimulating meetings with foreign stews, but places to sit down and be left alone – to occupy her comfort zone as “stasis mistress”.

Read if you wish: Mary-Kay Wilmers, being oblique, books on writing, Montaigne, public transport.
Available on: Bookstores, libraries, reading rooms for silent pensions.

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