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Weekend Reads - RAW 170609

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Enjoy your weekend with some interesting reads. Start with the latest three articles from this website and then check out some of my favourite, thoughtful articles from around the web. Don't forget to enjoy with your favourite beverage.




I get it, book lovers. We all stick to the party line that "the book is better than the movie," point blank. But let's be honest here: adaptations vary. You've got your solid, not-quite-as-good-as-the-books movies like the Harry Potter series. You've got your beloved, fan favorite films that some people like more than the book, like The Princess Bride. And then you've those truly great books that somehow ended up as the worst cinematic travesties in living memory. Here are a few books that are a million times better than the movie.

One of Britain’s most respected Tudor historians has expressed concern that prospective students imagine Hilary Mantel’s novels are fact. John Guy told the Hay literary festival in Wales that Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels needed to be enjoyed for what they were: fiction. Mantel’s two novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have been a literary phenomenon, both winning the Man Booker prize and being adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Latvia’s two twenty-year periods of democracy have been successful despite a lack of democratic traditions, surely calling into question the pessimistic Anglocentric theory that developing a stable constitutional polity requires signing Magna Carta and waiting five hundred years.

Most of management theory is inane, says a founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead. Much of management theory is at its core a collection of quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do, ensconced in a protective bubble of parables (otherwise known as case studies).

A chemistry professor in Florida has just found a way to trigger the process of photosynthesis in a synthetic material, turning greenhouse gases into clean air and producing energy all at the same time.



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