"Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" is also a great starting point if you want to get a sense of his darkly humorous fiction. Although, he embellishes and invents so many things in his non-fiction pieces that they straddle the line pretty nicely as well.
He's probably marginally better known as an essayist than as a novelist, except that his one famous novel (IJ) is one of the giant novels of the last 30 years. After IJ, the most impactful works of fiction he's produced are short story collections, and while I like them, they aren't the most pleasant reads.
The right way to approach DFW is to read his essays for awhile, and, if you find that you enjoy them, you can look at IJ as a long series of essays from an alternate universe.
I think Infinite Jest is a giant novel only in the most literal sense. Otherwise it's just terrible (though I know you and some other people I respect disagree strongly).
The point is, don't feel sad and alone if you like Wallace's non-fiction and find yourself hating his novels.
I like Infinite Jest the way I like R.E.M.'s "Murmur", in the sense that I can understand how either might fall apart at close inspection, but both are so effective at generating a mood for me that I have no motivation to do that.
I like the way DFW writes, but I'll happily cop to liking his essays more than his nonfiction. And again the short stories are unpleasant; sort of like how Elliott Smith can only seem to write songs that are at bottom about heroin addiction, DFW can only seem to write stories that are about how unhappy he is with the kind of person he is.
Also, DFW has sort of become a nerd literary signifier, a way of saying "once upon a time I put down the Xbox controller and picked up a Great Book". He didn't do anything to solicit that response, so I'm a bit wary about nerds sniping at him, because, hipsterism.
Everyone should go read Master And Margarita first.
I heard the section about Erdedy preparing for a drug binge on a BBC Radio 4 arts review program and was fascinated - I've never used drugs and have no desire to start but there is something very powerful about the sections of IJ that cover addiction.
I think the "still in beta" argument doesn't hold up so well. Many projects now stay in more-or-less permanent "beta", just as a sign that they're open to significant changes in the future.
With React libraries in particular, the ecosystem is still evolving so fast it seems relevant to note which are bug-prone, popular, etc, just to try and predict which will still be alive in a year.
As far as taxation and shipping go, not really. The Law of the Sea grants the right of innocent passage to all ships, so a country can't tax or harass ships merely passing through its waters. This holds for territorial waters as well as the Exclusive Economic Zone.
There are a couple exceptions for things like drug smuggling and terrorists, and now there's some concern whether these rules (fairly vague on paper) will be exploited by some for extensive search & seizures.
I made a site explaining the South China Sea disputes in particular if anyone is interested. southchinasea.co
> As far as taxation and shipping go, not really. The Law of the Sea grants the right of innocent passage to all ships, so a country can't tax or harass ships merely passing through its waters. This holds for territorial waters as well as the Exclusive Economic Zone.
I was unclear on the tax point, sorry; the extending of the baseline may determine the entitlement to tax resource use and extraction. You are correct in that UNCLOS prohibits tax of innocent passage.
On shipping it is also my understanding that UNCLOS grants broad rights to passage, though these are subject to those exceptions you mentioned, as well as an exception for "internal waters". I believe a couple cases turned on islands (which I am sure you also know about better than I do– my background is academic and dated!).
As an interesting aside, the word tariff comes from Tarifa, Spain, which would tax ships passing through the Strait of Gibraltar.
I've found it has better HTML output than medium-editor (though still not perfect) and has a more flexible design, though it requires a bit more developer involvement to get up and running.
Based on some incredibly cursory pre-coffee googling, it would be about $1200 for the ticket (assuming you want a decent private-ish berth), probably around $500 for a GoPro and various equipment (a way to mount it on the window, spare batteries, chargers, memory, etc.) and somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 for the flight back (I wouldn't want to subject you to eight hours on an S7 flight.)
$2500 is a pretty reasonable goal to throw up on a crowdfunding website.
But Forbes doesn't include any state or state-affiliated families. Considering the influence that is packaged with a billion dollars, it shouldn't be surprising that in many places wealth and political power are more closely tied than they might be in the US or Europe.
How many billionaires in the Middle East aren't counted? High ranking government officials in many countries also are likely billionaires via corruption.
It's unclear what proportion would be inherited vs new wealth, but it's another dimension worth considering.
Forbes 400 lists only Americans. It has nothing to do with Middle East billionaires or foreign government billionaires, who are listed under a different category.
From what I've seen, it wouldn't work, because they adjust your pricing based on the other items you've recently bought. More items/$ gets bigger discounts. Never used it though, so not 100% on how it's calculated.
