In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold-gay-talese/

Night walk, by Franz Wright

The all-night convenience store's empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to but a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday's newspaper --
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

#poetry

The comprehensive study, conducted by researchers from Linköping University in Sweden, the European University Institute in Italy and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, analyzed data from 59,400 Swedish men who took a military conscription test when they were young adults. The researchers then meticulously tracked their career trajectories, earnings and job prestige for over a decade, from when they were 35 until they turned 45.

The results showed a strong relationship between intelligence and earning potential until the figure exceeded $64,000 a year. Beyond this point, the correlation became almost negligible. And at the highest pay scales, intelligence plateaued, suggesting that other factors, such as socioeconomic background, culture, personality traits and luck, became more significant.

The study also found that job prestige didn't increase with cognitive ability at higher pay scales. In professions such as medicine, law and academia, more prestige didn't seem directly related to more income.

The findings challenge the idea that success and higher levels of income are earned by superior intellect and talent. Instead, the researchers suggest that small initial success differences between individuals can grow into extreme inequalities over time.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaires-actually-less-intelligent-lower-162839067.html?guccounter=1

China has installed the equivalent of four times the UK’s entire solar power capacity in the first five months of the year.

China’s solar capacity is now larger than the rest of the world combined, amounting to 228GW, setting it on course to exceed 2030 renewable energy targets by 2025, analysts said.

https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1019292/china-builds-equivalent-to-four-times-uk-solar-capacity-in-months-1019292.html

"In 2021, China set a goal for renewable capacity — including wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power — to exceed fossil fuel capacity by 2025, a target that it has hit two years ahead of schedule, Reuters reports. Renewable sources, as China defines them, now make up 50.9 percent of the country’s power capacity."

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-zero-carbon-electricity