The New Yorker, 2006-02-13&20, b
Sep. 1st, 2007 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoe"Dept. of Social Services: Million-Dollar Murray" / Malcolm Gladwell
__ Power-law homelessness policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency. <> That is what is so perplexing about power-law homelessness policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn't seem fair.
"The Opera Lover" / James B. Stewart
{Very gossipy.}
__ "You're never feted as much for the second ten million as you are for the first."
__ "Asking Alberto for money was like offering an alcoholic a drink."
"The Stand-off" / Steve Coll
__ Pakistan’s military has tried to avoid a wider war, but, time and again, it has found that managing jihadi groups can be an inexact art.
"The Saintly Sinner" / Joan Acocella
__ Richard Crashaw's "Saint Mary Magdalene, or the Weeper" (1646): : "two faithful fountains, two walking baths; two weeping motions; / Portable, and compendious oceans"
__ "maudlin", meaning of "mawkishly lachrymose"
__ The Catholic saints, however ill-founded their biographies, are a vivid group, each with a certain kind of hair and a certain hat.. They are like a collection of dolls or superheroes, or like the Hindu pantheon - full of color and variety.
"Shining Tree of Life" / Adam Gopnik
__ Power-law homelessness policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency. <> That is what is so perplexing about power-law homelessness policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn't seem fair.
"The Opera Lover" / James B. Stewart
{Very gossipy.}
__ "You're never feted as much for the second ten million as you are for the first."
__ "Asking Alberto for money was like offering an alcoholic a drink."
"The Stand-off" / Steve Coll
__ Pakistan’s military has tried to avoid a wider war, but, time and again, it has found that managing jihadi groups can be an inexact art.
"The Saintly Sinner" / Joan Acocella
__ Richard Crashaw's "Saint Mary Magdalene, or the Weeper" (1646): : "two faithful fountains, two walking baths; two weeping motions; / Portable, and compendious oceans"
__ "maudlin", meaning of "mawkishly lachrymose"
__ The Catholic saints, however ill-founded their biographies, are a vivid group, each with a certain kind of hair and a certain hat.. They are like a collection of dolls or superheroes, or like the Hindu pantheon - full of color and variety.
"Shining Tree of Life" / Adam Gopnik
- Weary old faiths make art while hot young sects make only trouble. Insincerity, or at least familiarity, seems to be a precondition of a great religious art.
- It is not a negative simplicity... No, their objects show a knowing, creative, shaping simplicity, and to look at a single Shaker box is to see an attenuated asymmetry, a slender, bending eccentricity,
- Much as St. Augustine lent some of his sense of guilt and morbidity to early Christianity, Ann gave her neurasthenic desire for order and hyper-organization to all the later Shakers.
- The urge to make consumer goods is, after all, one of the keenest spiritual disciplines that an ascetic can face: it forces spirit to take form. An ascetic drinking tea from a cup decides not to care what kind of cup he’s drinking from; an ascetic forced to make a cup has to ask what kind of cup he ought to drink from.
- a chatty, anecdotal all-overness (being) the normal round of folk art
- One sees the same principle—apparent rationality inflected with an underlying obsessiveness—in the prime Shaker objects. ... “God is in the details”—but the details have to provide evidence of God.
- Repetition and the grid are two alternatives to design that refers to classical perspective space and the roundly realized human body.
- The love of asymmetry, which seems to us so sophisticated, involves a violation of the same taboo, since symmetry is the essence of human beauty. All Shaker design implies a liberation from “humanism” of this kind. When we make objects that look like us, we unconsciously are flattering ourselves.
- They permanently defined a curiously American composition, played in the blue key of E: enlightenment, entrepreneurialism, and exploitation all in counterpoint, with a half-heard chord of illicit eroticism.
