Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Ada Palmer is a wonder. Not only is she a tenured University of Chicago historian who specializes in the forbidden information of Florence during the Inquisitions (witchcraft, homosexuality, heresy and other fascinating subjects); sheās also a composer, librettist and performer whose album-length retelling of Norse mythos is, astoundingly, exceeded by her song about space travel (if this doesnāt make you well up, I donāt want to know you).
And to top it all off, sheās a brilliant science fiction writer, whose inaugural series, Terra Ignota, has just concluded with its fourth and final volume, Perhaps the Stars.
If you do much reading about antitrust, youāre sure to come across Ida Tarbell, the campaigning investigative journalist whose masterful 1904 book, The History of the Standard Oil Company (free ebook, free audiobook), brought down John D. Rockefeller and his monopolistic Standard Oil Company, which was broken up in 1911. It split into seven companies, many of which are still with usāor were, until recent mergers (think: Exxon, Mobil, Esso, Chevron, Texaco, and Amoco).
Continue reading "A Monopoly Isnāt the Same as Legitimate Greatness"
