The Procrastinator (some) Times: xmas edition

The Procrastinator (some) Times Sunday 15th of December Edition

EDITORIAL

This edition of The Procrastinator is harder better, stronger, but not faster. It's a long one. Since we are taking our Christmas holidays we wanted to make this edition special. Ideally you will have enough content to procrastinate meaningfully for the next three weeks. Additionally to the regular sections, you have nice recommendations of photography expos to visit in December/January in New York curated by Andreína in Photoautomat; an amazing Christmas Gifts Guide by La Guía del Perro and our favorite part: our predictions for 2014. Intrigued? Good. Keep reading!

Thanks for your support and hope to see you all back in 2014. If you don't follow us in twitter, go ahead, we're (kinda) fun; if you want to collaborate with us, please do so; and of course, have an awesome Christmas and a beautiful 2014!

Happy Sunday and happy reading.

NEWS

Photo via The New Yorker.

Mandela's Politics of Forgiveness. Jelani Cobb writes in The New Yorker: "it’s one thing to make forgiveness an element of a humanitarian movement; it’s quite another to enact it as public policy. King sagely and sincerely presented racial reconciliation as a function of Christian love; Mandela knew that beyond his own spiritual inclinations racial reconciliation was an imperative of national survival." Certainly, as Cobb says, Mandela emerged at a rare point in history where idealism and pragmatism were practically indistinguishable. In my humble opinion, even though is the hardest thing to do, that is the only thing a broken country can do to be healed. Read full article in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 6'

Photo via www.notonthehighstreet.com

The most successful meme. Very close to his birthday The Independent published an article about the book Who’s Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank (Cambridge University Press, 2013), that declares Jesus as the most influential person ever. The authors Steven Skiena and Charles Ward used internet-based metrics to make the claim. Jesus, the Christian Messiah, beat playwright William Shakespeare, philosopher Aristotle and Macedonian King Alexander the Great to the top spot. Notably, there are no female historical figures in the top ten." Read full article here. E.T.P. 6'

Image via Fast Company.

The Insanity of Bitcoin explained. Apparently the world thinks that everybody should understand Bitcoin before 2013 is over, so if you missed The Economist article we posted a couple of weeks ago, here's Fast Company's one that include a video made by Duncan Elms that promised to be "as fun as dropping a tab and hitting the planetarium for a Pink Floyd laser show"... whatever that means. It is a nice video and your E.T.P. is only 3'24'' for the video, 6' if you also read the article.

Finally The Economist presents its Calendar 2014, with a seleccion of events around the world in 2014. From Greece taking over the European Union rotating presidency and the beginning of the Chinese horse year, in January, to the release of “The Hobbit: There and Back Again”, the third in the Tolkien film trilogy, in December. Have a look here. E.T.P 7'

SCIENCE

Image via New Scientist.

Not quite sure if this news belong to the Science, the Entertainment or the yet-to-be-created WTF section: "Phoenix will be reborn – this time as a reality TV star. Mars One, a Dutch organisation based around the wacky idea of putting a human colony on the Red Planet and turning it into a TV show, says it will launch a copy of NASA's Phoenix Mars lander in 2018. How the group will fund the robotic mission is unclear but if successful, it could be the first private venture to land on Mars.

The lander would be part of a precursor mission to lay the foundations for the Martian colonists, due to arrive in 2025." Read full article in the New Scientist. E.T.P 3'

Photo The Procrastinator (some) Times.

"It is 6.06am and I’m typing this in my pyjamas. I awoke at 6.04am, walked from the bedroom to the study, switched on my computer and got to work immediately. This is unusual behaviour for me. However, it’s a tried and tested technique for enhancing creativity, long used by writers, poets and others, including the inventor Benjamin Franklin. And psychology research appears to back this up, providing an explanation for why we might be at our most creative when our minds are still emerging from the realm of sleep." Read full article by Tom Stafford in Mindhacks. E.T.P. 5'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Painting by Bo Bartlett via Fast Company.

Good news! Well, more like a confirmation for the skeptical ones. "A team of social scientists at the University of Arkansas is trying to scientifically prove the benefits of exposure to art. What they found, in a recent study published in the journals Education Next and Educational Researcher, is that students who are exposed to cultural institutions, like museums and performing arts centers, not only have higher levels of engagement with the arts but display greater tolerance, historical empathy, as well as better educational memory and critical thinking skills". Read full Jennifer Miller's article in Fast Company.

Movie still via The New Yorker

Joel and Ethan Coen’s new film Inside Llewyn Davis UK premiere is the 24th of January, and after reading Richard Brody's article it in The New Yorker is worth saving the date. Inside Llewyn Davis 'is a dramatization of an aphorism by Nietzsche about a pair of common “mistakes”: “Behind a remarkable scholar we not infrequently find an average human being, and behind an average artist we often find—a very remarkable human being.”
The Coens make no mistake in the discovery of a very remarkable human being behind an average artist, and they look upon their protagonist—a struggling folk singer in the Greenwich Village scene in 1961—with extraordinary sympathy and curiosity.' Read full article here. E.T.P. 7'

Jonas Mekas via The Atlantic.

Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic tells us that one of the best websites on the Internet belongs to Jonas Mekas. "From the introductory video, in which Mekas welcomes his friends to the site and plays the bugle, to the videos of Alan Ginsberg or Mekas playing with his first Sony Camcorder, the site exudes the joy of creation." We visited and it's absolutely true, and as Mekas say "it's very exciting!" One awesome place for inspiring procrastination, updated almost daily with photos, films, documents and stories by the lovely 91 years old genius. So go ahead and read Alexis's article here (E.T.P. 3'), and visit Jonas Mekas's website here (E.T.P. 30-90').

Image via The New Yorker.

The New Yorker asked some contributors like Dan Chiasson, Teju Cole and Junot Diaz, for their favorite books they read this year. Most of them named new books, some picked older favorites. Have a look at this interesting list. Part I and Part II. E.T.P. 12' (total).

Movie still Frances Ha. Creenplay by Greta Grewig.

14 Screenwriters writing. "In the starry constellation of literary pursuits, screenwriters have always existed, reputationally if not financially, somewhere due south of novelists and maybe southeast of poets and playwrights. With their riches and big-screen credits, people who wrote for the movies used to be able to at least lord over lowly TV writers, but even that dynamic has reversed in recent years. TV writers are now routinely lauded as auteurs. Screenwriters are still screenwriters, i.e., the people who write the scripts that the directors and actors will eventually rewrite, mangle or ignore." Have a look at what Greta Grewig, Ethan Hawke and Richard Likelater have to say about screenwriting in this article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 7'

PHOTOAUTOMAT

Hello everyone. For this next three weeks of holiday procrastination this are some cool photo exhibits you can see in NYC in December/January. Hope to see you there!

ICP Museum

1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036