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fiefoe"Death Dust" / Dana Goodyear
Williamson sold the Taurus, without disclosing that it was the suspected source of infection. “We talked a lot about it,” the doctor told me. “We were going to call Click and Clack at ‘Car Talk.’ The car itself is not dangerous, unless the buyer is immune-compromised. Which is then true for any car sold to anyone out of Arizona.”
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"Thresholds of Violence" / Malcolm Gladwell
Between Columbine and Aaron Ybarra, the riot changed: it became more and more self-referential, more ritualized, more and more about identification with the school-shooting tradition. Eric Harris wanted to start a revolution. Aguilar and Ybarra wanted to join one.
Harris saw himself as a hero. Aguilar and Ybarra were hero-worshippers.
Ybarra was a student of Virginia Tech and Columbine. LaDue is a scholar of the genre, who speaks of his influences the way a budding filmmaker might talk about Fellini or Bergman.
"Pond Scum" / Kathryn Schulz
Thoreau never met an appetite too innocuous to denounce. He condemned those who gathered cranberries for jam (“So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass”) and regarded salt as “that grossest of groceries”; if he did without it, he boasted, he could also drink less water.
He permitted himself to plant beans, but cautiously, calling it “a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation.”
It is also in contemplating the land that Thoreau got the big picture right. “We can never have enough of nature,” he wrote. “We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”
"Road Warrior" / Jane Kramer
I once asked Steinem what the real-estate developer and publisher Mort Zuckerman—a man I had seen, years earlier, signalling her to light his cigar—was doing on her otherwise egalitarian list of former lovers, which includes, most enduringly, Franklin Thomas, who for seventeen years was the head of the Ford Foundation (“the longtime love of my life, and best friend”), along with the great alto saxophonist and composer of “Take Five,” Paul Desmond (“a close friend and a short romance”), the director Mike Nichols (“more like three or four years of a smart date”), the Ford Administration’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Stan Pottinger (“We’d been together long enough, so we stopped the affair”), and the Olympic decathlete and actor Rafer Johnson, who helped tackle Sirhan Sirhan, moments after he shot Bobby Kennedy (“I have lasting respect for him”).
Steinem welcomed them all—the rich, the celebrities, the climbers for the cause. She was a radical but, consciously, never an outsider.
She enjoyed the world where she plied her trade as an entrepreneur of social change, and, with her mouth spray at hand, she had long since mastered the subterfuges of talking truth to power. You could call it consciousness-raising—on a wider canvas.
Claudia Roth Pierpont on Leni Riefenstahl: But, at her own best evaluation, she was a woman who never came face to face with anything, because the only face she saw was her own.
______________________
James Surowiecki: since 1990, nearly ninety per cent of federal coal leases have had just one bidder. That’s held down the price of leases, in effect handing the coal industry a giant subsidy. A study released in September by a coalition of research groups found that production subsidies in the basin amount to nearly three billion dollars a year.
"Teach Yourself Italian"/ Jhumpa Lahiri
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/07/teach-yourself-italian
When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
In Mantua, thanks to them, I finally find myself inside the language. Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.
At the festival in Rome I manage to exchange three, four, maybe five sentences with someone. After that I stop; it’s impossible to do more. I count the sentences, as if they were strokes in a tennis game, as if they were strokes when you’re learning to swim.
With her my strange devotion to the language seems more a vocation than a folly.
***I read slowly, painstakingly. With difficulty. Every page seems to have a light covering of mist. The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a marvel, every unknown word a jewel.
A second metaphor comes to mind: it’s as if, poorly equipped, I were climbing a mountain. It’s a sort of literary act of survival. I don’t have many words to express myself—rather, the opposite. I’m aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.
he wrote, “A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.”
The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch—of the entire universe and all it contains—is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.
Bronx Dreams / Ian Frazier
Toward the end, in the scene when Odysseus, who has finally returned home, throws off the rags disguising him as a beggar and reveals himself to his fellow-Ithacans, and they shout for joy, the professional actor playing him, Brandon Victor Dixon, went over to Alizah and lifted her up high. Seeing the complete happiness on her face at that moment, there under the lights and the sky and the stars and the helicopters, I felt a rush of affection for her and for the entire city of New York. This cross-binding love is the point of the city, the lashings and the bracings of it, and it’s the deep purpose of DreamYard. I understood that the kids are all our kids. Sitting a few rows in front of me, Jason Duchin looked even happier than I was.
Williamson sold the Taurus, without disclosing that it was the suspected source of infection. “We talked a lot about it,” the doctor told me. “We were going to call Click and Clack at ‘Car Talk.’ The car itself is not dangerous, unless the buyer is immune-compromised. Which is then true for any car sold to anyone out of Arizona.”
-----------------------
"Thresholds of Violence" / Malcolm Gladwell
Between Columbine and Aaron Ybarra, the riot changed: it became more and more self-referential, more ritualized, more and more about identification with the school-shooting tradition. Eric Harris wanted to start a revolution. Aguilar and Ybarra wanted to join one.
Harris saw himself as a hero. Aguilar and Ybarra were hero-worshippers.
Ybarra was a student of Virginia Tech and Columbine. LaDue is a scholar of the genre, who speaks of his influences the way a budding filmmaker might talk about Fellini or Bergman.
"Pond Scum" / Kathryn Schulz
Thoreau never met an appetite too innocuous to denounce. He condemned those who gathered cranberries for jam (“So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass”) and regarded salt as “that grossest of groceries”; if he did without it, he boasted, he could also drink less water.
He permitted himself to plant beans, but cautiously, calling it “a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation.”
It is also in contemplating the land that Thoreau got the big picture right. “We can never have enough of nature,” he wrote. “We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”
"Road Warrior" / Jane Kramer
I once asked Steinem what the real-estate developer and publisher Mort Zuckerman—a man I had seen, years earlier, signalling her to light his cigar—was doing on her otherwise egalitarian list of former lovers, which includes, most enduringly, Franklin Thomas, who for seventeen years was the head of the Ford Foundation (“the longtime love of my life, and best friend”), along with the great alto saxophonist and composer of “Take Five,” Paul Desmond (“a close friend and a short romance”), the director Mike Nichols (“more like three or four years of a smart date”), the Ford Administration’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Stan Pottinger (“We’d been together long enough, so we stopped the affair”), and the Olympic decathlete and actor Rafer Johnson, who helped tackle Sirhan Sirhan, moments after he shot Bobby Kennedy (“I have lasting respect for him”).
Steinem welcomed them all—the rich, the celebrities, the climbers for the cause. She was a radical but, consciously, never an outsider.
She enjoyed the world where she plied her trade as an entrepreneur of social change, and, with her mouth spray at hand, she had long since mastered the subterfuges of talking truth to power. You could call it consciousness-raising—on a wider canvas.
Claudia Roth Pierpont on Leni Riefenstahl: But, at her own best evaluation, she was a woman who never came face to face with anything, because the only face she saw was her own.
______________________
James Surowiecki: since 1990, nearly ninety per cent of federal coal leases have had just one bidder. That’s held down the price of leases, in effect handing the coal industry a giant subsidy. A study released in September by a coalition of research groups found that production subsidies in the basin amount to nearly three billion dollars a year.
"Teach Yourself Italian"/ Jhumpa Lahiri
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/07/teach-yourself-italian
When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
In Mantua, thanks to them, I finally find myself inside the language. Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.
At the festival in Rome I manage to exchange three, four, maybe five sentences with someone. After that I stop; it’s impossible to do more. I count the sentences, as if they were strokes in a tennis game, as if they were strokes when you’re learning to swim.
With her my strange devotion to the language seems more a vocation than a folly.
***I read slowly, painstakingly. With difficulty. Every page seems to have a light covering of mist. The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a marvel, every unknown word a jewel.
A second metaphor comes to mind: it’s as if, poorly equipped, I were climbing a mountain. It’s a sort of literary act of survival. I don’t have many words to express myself—rather, the opposite. I’m aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.
he wrote, “A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.”
The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch—of the entire universe and all it contains—is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.
Bronx Dreams / Ian Frazier
Toward the end, in the scene when Odysseus, who has finally returned home, throws off the rags disguising him as a beggar and reveals himself to his fellow-Ithacans, and they shout for joy, the professional actor playing him, Brandon Victor Dixon, went over to Alizah and lifted her up high. Seeing the complete happiness on her face at that moment, there under the lights and the sky and the stars and the helicopters, I felt a rush of affection for her and for the entire city of New York. This cross-binding love is the point of the city, the lashings and the bracings of it, and it’s the deep purpose of DreamYard. I understood that the kids are all our kids. Sitting a few rows in front of me, Jason Duchin looked even happier than I was.
