December 2010
38 posts
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“The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the...”
– - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
This sentence made me think of one of the more famous passages to emerge from the Bush era. It’s from writer Ron Suskind:
The (Bush) aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined...
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“… neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for...”
– - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
I’m listening to this as an audiobook and it’s literally changing my gait, altering the way I move as I walk our dogs around the neighborhood. I’m concentrating so hard and rewinding more than usual, and there’s this...
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“McGovern … told a crowd in New York that he would be willing to commit...”
– - from the 10/16/72 edition of TIME magazine.
As of last night, this quote and another one from the NYT are tacked on as an update to my 12/17 post challenging the following recent claim by Martin Peretz of The New Republic:
Imagine, by the way, if George McGovern had defeated Nixon in the 1972...
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“Imagine, by the way, if George McGovern had defeated Nixon in the 1972 election....”
– - Martin Peretz, shining the most flattering light imaginable on the recent disclosure that Henry Kissinger told Nixon that the “emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an...
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“SIMPLICIO: Yes, but before you can write your own poems you need to learn the...”
– - from “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart, which has my brain as wide awake as it has been in a long time
It starts like this:
A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are...
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“Some see the end of DADT as some kind of special gesture to a minority. I think...”
– - Andrew Sullivan today in a post called “Joe Lieberman, Civil Rights Hero”
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WaPo follow-up story on Holbrooke's "final" words
Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung fill in the details. The cardboard cutout “Pakistani surgeon” has taken the more convincing, three-dimensional form of “Farzad Najam, a thoracic surgeon of Pakistani descent.”
Dr. Najam, in this account, seems not to have been present for the famous final words. If I’m reading it correctly, it’s not even clear that the...
“I’m fated to deal in mixtures, slumgullions… As soon as I hear a proposition I...”
– Donald Barthelme (via theparisreview)
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newsweek:
“You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”
- Richard Holbrooke’s last words. (via cajunboy)
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Come on, Newsweek. Be journalists when you reblog. Make some minimal effort to add context.
From the WaPo obituary in the link above:
As Mr. Holbrooke was sedated for surgery, family members said, his final words were to his Pakistani surgeon: “You’ve...
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“Sometimes I’m dazzled by how modern and fabulous we are, and how easy everything...”
– - Susan Orlean from the latest post on her newyorker.com blog
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“This time I conceded up front that it could never take the place of my old...”
– - the NYT’s Virginia Heffernan on giving Pandora another try
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“The idea of the physical book is so loaded with emotion—books helped us sleep...”
– - Jason Allen Ashlock, laying out the “set of beliefs that fuel” Movable Type Literary Group, the agency he founded last February.
Here, as succinctly as I can think to put it, is why I hope any of you looking for a literary agent will end up with someone like Ashlock: The future...
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“Is it because learning to drive is a particularly emotional moment—good or...”
– - Charlie Hopper on mcsweeneys.net, exploring the improbable wallop of Alan Jackson’s “Drive (For Daddy Gene)”
I first heard this song while vacationing on the Washington coast with some of our best friends. One of them — the one who grew up in Yakima, go figure — has a playlist...
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McCain Calls Pentagon's 'Don't Ask' Study Flawed →
Beyond the simple brazenness of McCain’s obstructionism here, it’s galling to hear the man refer to any study as flawed. This, after all, is the man who once said:
But I want to tell you, I visited an oil rig off the Louisiana coast. It survived hurricanes, it is safe, it is sound…and you look down, there’s fish everywhere. Fish love to be around those rigs. So not only...
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“… would arresting Assange really put an end to Wikileaks or something like...”
– - Andrew Sullivan blogging about “The ‘Get Assange’ Chorus”
Meanwhile, I just saw a tweet that comes at this from a slightly different angle. Tim Maly, aka @doingitwrong, wrote: “Wikileaks reinforces the feeling I’ve had since Enron that I should assume every...
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