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fiefoeJeffrey Toobin: Justice Scalia’s views—passionately felt and pungently expressed though they were—now seem like so many boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
"The Scold" / Nick Paumgarten
__ She went on, “I’ve gotten used to it all, but he’s a weird dude.” He uses a woodworker’s vise to squeeze more juice out of limes. He stirs peanut butter with a power drill.
"Helium Dreams" / Jeanne Marie Laskas
"Shut Up and Sit Down" / Joshua Rothman
"The Billionaires’ Loophole" / Alec MacGillis
__ In 1986, Stephen Norris, a lawyer for Marriott, learned of a change to the federal tax code recently initiated by Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. It allowed Alaska Native corporations, created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, to sell their paper losses at a discount to companies that could use them to reduce their own taxes. Norris started a business that matched companies with Native Alaskans and persuaded Rubenstein to leave Shaw, Pittman and join him. In a single year, they brokered the transfer of a billion dollars in losses, earning at least ten million dollars in fees. In 1987, they were on the verge of another big transfer when the government closed that loophole. The episode became known in Washington business lore as the Great Eskimo Tax Scam.
Thomas Mallon: seeing the cosmic joke from a cosmic distance in the manner of Muriel Spark
Anthony Lane:
__ aromatic nothings: "Between desire and reality. Between fact and breakfast."
__ The hazard of the full-time transcedentalist: sooner or later, you run out of stuff to transcend.
____________________________________________________________
"Magic Beans" / David Owen
__ The beans were decorations, not party favors, Greene explained. He was going to retrieve them all at the end of the evening, for eventual planting—a necessity, because the dinner series had depleted the global inventory.
"Runs in the Family" / Siddhartha Mukherjee
__ I’m not sure how it is in small families, but in large ones relationships tend to shift over time. You might be best friends with one brother or sister, then two years later it might be someone else. Then it’s likely to change again, and again after that. It doesn’t mean that you’ve fallen out with the person you used to be closest to but that you’ve merged into someone else’s lane, or had him or her merge into yours. Trios form, then morph into quartets before splitting into teams of two. The beauty of it is that it’s always changing.
"Imaginary Spaces" / Andrew O’Hagan
__ “People’s jobs are funny,” she said, pointing out the showrunner. “That woman’s whole life is about counting the number of seconds between each model.”
__“It’s a form of beautiful hell,” Benedict Cumberbatch said, when I asked him what it was like to act on the set. “It has everything you need, psychologically, to do the play. The scale of the set is just so infantilizing, this cold, skeletal palace, the sense of bloodless decay everywhere, all that iconography of leadership, those weapons of formalized violence, and a sole piano. Just walking over that set, you can feel it chime with Hamlet’s consciousness. It’s a wonderful springboard for a man who is disgusted with the world. He looks at everything that should be beautiful and sees nothing but pollution. With Es, it’s always what lies beneath, like the toys beneath those stairs.
"The Scold" / Nick Paumgarten
__ She went on, “I’ve gotten used to it all, but he’s a weird dude.” He uses a woodworker’s vise to squeeze more juice out of limes. He stirs peanut butter with a power drill.
"Helium Dreams" / Jeanne Marie Laskas
- During the First World War, Germany and its allies ceased production of sausages so that there would be enough cow guts to make zeppelins from which to bomb England.
- Airships are unlike other engineering pursuits. The science is about floating through clouds, about complex negotiations involving gravity and the breeze. It’s as if math married romance. It attracts certain people. Enthusiastic people./li>
- “We’re headed northbound, from Palmdale,” J.B. said. “This is where Chuck Yeager took off to do the speed-of-sound run. Strapped into X1 underneath a B-29.”
Everyone more or less agreed that being “aloft” in the LMH-1 was not like that.
“We’re flying?” - “The bottom line is, you’re not in a hurry.”
“It’s like the least stressful job ever.”
“You’ll get a lot of reading done.”
“There. Just landed.”
“We landed?”
"Shut Up and Sit Down" / Joshua Rothman
- Before a leader can pull us out of despair, we have to fall into it. For this reason, a melancholy ambivalence can cling to even the most inspiring stories of leadership.
- It can be dangerous to decide that you need to be led.
- Leadership may be, by its nature, an anxious and inconstant idea. Like “status” or “alienation,” the word “leadership” points not toward a stable concept but toward a problem or affliction unique to modernity.
- If Mukunda is right, you should think about the context in which you find yourself when you choose a leader. The question isn’t whether a dark-horse candidate will make a good leader (who can know?) but whether times are bad enough to justify gambling on a dark-horse candidate.
- Leaders, the scholars concluded, are narrative devices. It’s through thinking about leadership and leaders that we arrive at “an intellectually compelling and emotionally satisfying comprehension of the causes, nature, and consequences of organizational activities. It is the way many prefer to cope and come to grips with the cognitive and moral complexities” of reality. It humanizes the forces that shape history—“forces that are often unknowable and indeterminant, perhaps even objectionable.”
___________________________________________________________
"The Billionaires’ Loophole" / Alec MacGillis
__ In 1986, Stephen Norris, a lawyer for Marriott, learned of a change to the federal tax code recently initiated by Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. It allowed Alaska Native corporations, created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, to sell their paper losses at a discount to companies that could use them to reduce their own taxes. Norris started a business that matched companies with Native Alaskans and persuaded Rubenstein to leave Shaw, Pittman and join him. In a single year, they brokered the transfer of a billion dollars in losses, earning at least ten million dollars in fees. In 1987, they were on the verge of another big transfer when the government closed that loophole. The episode became known in Washington business lore as the Great Eskimo Tax Scam.
Thomas Mallon: seeing the cosmic joke from a cosmic distance in the manner of Muriel Spark
Anthony Lane:
__ aromatic nothings: "Between desire and reality. Between fact and breakfast."
__ The hazard of the full-time transcedentalist: sooner or later, you run out of stuff to transcend.
____________________________________________________________
"Magic Beans" / David Owen
__ The beans were decorations, not party favors, Greene explained. He was going to retrieve them all at the end of the evening, for eventual planting—a necessity, because the dinner series had depleted the global inventory.
"Runs in the Family" / Siddhartha Mukherjee
- The word moni means “gem” in Bengali, but in common usage it also refers to something ineffably beautiful: the shining pinpricks of light in each eye.
- I have never seen her more formidable. Her Bengali furls backward toward its village origins. I can make out some words, thick with accent and idiom: womb, wash, taint. When I piece the sentence together, its poison is remarkable: If you hit him, I will wash my womb with water to clean your taint, she says. I will wash my womb.
My father is frothing with tears now. His head hangs heavily. Wash it, he says under his breath, pleadingly. Wash it, clean it, wash it. - Long before the eyelids open, during the early development of the visual system, waves of spontaneous activity ripple from the retina to the brain, like dancers running through their motions before a performance. These waves reconfigure the wiring of the brain—rehearsing its future circuits, strengthening and loosening the connections between neurons. (The neurobiologist Carla Shatz, who discovered these waves of spontaneous activity, wrote, “Cells that fire together, wire together.”) This fetal warmup act is crucial to the performance of the visual system: the world has to be dreamed before it is seen.
- The Stevens and Barres study, published in the journal Cell in 2007, documented one of the most arresting instances of repurposing in biology: a protein designed to ticket germs and junk for destruction had been co-opted by the nervous system to ticket synapses for destruction. “It reinforces an old intuition,” my psychiatrist friend Hans, in Boston, told me. “The secret of learning is the systematic elimination of excess. We grow, mostly, by dying.”
- Push the activity of the gene beyond some point, and Bleuler’s threads of association break; a mind-demolishing illness is unleashed. Swerve too far in the other direction, and we lose our capacity for adaptive learning; the blooming, buzzing confusions of childhood—its naïve, unshorn circuits—are retained. Our unique selves must live in some balanced state between overedited and underedited brain circuits, between overpruned and underpruned synapses.
- It was smaller than I had expected—as places reconstructed from borrowed memories inevitably are—and also duller and dustier. Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays. We climbed a narrow gullet of stairs to a pair of small rooms.
__ I’m not sure how it is in small families, but in large ones relationships tend to shift over time. You might be best friends with one brother or sister, then two years later it might be someone else. Then it’s likely to change again, and again after that. It doesn’t mean that you’ve fallen out with the person you used to be closest to but that you’ve merged into someone else’s lane, or had him or her merge into yours. Trios form, then morph into quartets before splitting into teams of two. The beauty of it is that it’s always changing.
"Imaginary Spaces" / Andrew O’Hagan
__ “People’s jobs are funny,” she said, pointing out the showrunner. “That woman’s whole life is about counting the number of seconds between each model.”
__“It’s a form of beautiful hell,” Benedict Cumberbatch said, when I asked him what it was like to act on the set. “It has everything you need, psychologically, to do the play. The scale of the set is just so infantilizing, this cold, skeletal palace, the sense of bloodless decay everywhere, all that iconography of leadership, those weapons of formalized violence, and a sole piano. Just walking over that set, you can feel it chime with Hamlet’s consciousness. It’s a wonderful springboard for a man who is disgusted with the world. He looks at everything that should be beautiful and sees nothing but pollution. With Es, it’s always what lies beneath, like the toys beneath those stairs.
