![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoe“The Model American” / Lauren Collins
__ Not only does she never joke about her husband; she is entirely self-serious. The most un-American thing about her is that she is discreet about her weaknesses. She doesn’t attempt to bond by deprecating herself.
“The Showman” / Jeffrey Toobin
__ He quickly gained nearly three hundred thousand Twitter followers, many of them in Turkey, and has had to decline numerous offers of Turkish rugs and delicacies, though he did take his son out for Turkish food.
"Track Changes" / Kathryn Schulz
__ he raises a toast in an all-white bar to Jefferson Davis:
May he be set afloat on a boat without compass or rudder, then that any contents be swallowed by a shark, the shark by a whale, whale in the devil’s belly and the devil in hell, the gates locked and the keys lost, and further, may he be put in the north west corner with a south west wind blowing ashes in his eyes for all Eternity. Say aye if ye mean aye!
__ Hellsmouth’s legs, that scarily slender birthright of Thoroughbreds, are “dark and knotty rose stems.”
__ We live our lives within doubled constraints—the mystery of human nature operating within us, all of history bearing down upon us. Morgan places her characters in these binds and asks what it would take, in the face of them, to be moral... One of Morgan’s remarkable achievements in this novel is to wind all the clocks at once: a mortal one, which stops too soon (“time is a horse you never have to whip”); a historical one, which stops when memory runs down; and a cosmological one, which never stops at all.
"Liberal-In-Chief" / Adam Gopnik
__ The American Presidency has developed an unfortunate resemblance not so much to an imperial throne, as some insist, as to the medieval papacy, with an obsessive pomposity of office producing all those hangar-size libraries and bricklike memoirs. We talk solemnly about “his Presidency” (so far), just as people in the Middle Ages talked about “his papacy,” not as a powerful office but as an epoch of spiritual leadership.
__ Liberalism of the kind he practices, the President has been saying, is the most truly radical of ideologies, inasmuch as it proposes a change, makes it happen, and then makes it last... Liberalism is a belief in radical change made through practical measures.
"The Bath: A Polemic" / Jessi Klein
__ To me, there has always been something vaguely miserable about bathing. The soaking, the sitting, the water getting dirty and cold, the inevitable random hair floating up against your skin, the pruning. It makes me feel as if I were stewing up the world’s saddest soup out of myself.
"The End of the End of the World" / Jonathan Franzen
__ “Dating is just for other people to know that you’re dating,” Sophia says. “People post about it all the time. Like kissing photos.” This seems to be the consensus across “American Girls.” It sounds familiar. “Men were only the gloves with which one slapped the face of girls,” says a character from a nineteen-twenties short story about college which Weigel quotes. “It was women one dueled.”
"A Full Revolution" / Reeves Wiedeman
__ Not only does she never joke about her husband; she is entirely self-serious. The most un-American thing about her is that she is discreet about her weaknesses. She doesn’t attempt to bond by deprecating herself.
“The Showman” / Jeffrey Toobin
__ He quickly gained nearly three hundred thousand Twitter followers, many of them in Turkey, and has had to decline numerous offers of Turkish rugs and delicacies, though he did take his son out for Turkish food.
"Track Changes" / Kathryn Schulz
__ he raises a toast in an all-white bar to Jefferson Davis:
May he be set afloat on a boat without compass or rudder, then that any contents be swallowed by a shark, the shark by a whale, whale in the devil’s belly and the devil in hell, the gates locked and the keys lost, and further, may he be put in the north west corner with a south west wind blowing ashes in his eyes for all Eternity. Say aye if ye mean aye!
__ Hellsmouth’s legs, that scarily slender birthright of Thoroughbreds, are “dark and knotty rose stems.”
__ We live our lives within doubled constraints—the mystery of human nature operating within us, all of history bearing down upon us. Morgan places her characters in these binds and asks what it would take, in the face of them, to be moral... One of Morgan’s remarkable achievements in this novel is to wind all the clocks at once: a mortal one, which stops too soon (“time is a horse you never have to whip”); a historical one, which stops when memory runs down; and a cosmological one, which never stops at all.
_________________________________________
"Liberal-In-Chief" / Adam Gopnik
__ The American Presidency has developed an unfortunate resemblance not so much to an imperial throne, as some insist, as to the medieval papacy, with an obsessive pomposity of office producing all those hangar-size libraries and bricklike memoirs. We talk solemnly about “his Presidency” (so far), just as people in the Middle Ages talked about “his papacy,” not as a powerful office but as an epoch of spiritual leadership.
__ Liberalism of the kind he practices, the President has been saying, is the most truly radical of ideologies, inasmuch as it proposes a change, makes it happen, and then makes it last... Liberalism is a belief in radical change made through practical measures.
"The Bath: A Polemic" / Jessi Klein
__ To me, there has always been something vaguely miserable about bathing. The soaking, the sitting, the water getting dirty and cold, the inevitable random hair floating up against your skin, the pruning. It makes me feel as if I were stewing up the world’s saddest soup out of myself.
"The End of the End of the World" / Jonathan Franzen
- The talk—about her house’s décor, about her acquaintance with Delaware’s governor, about the direction the nation had taken—was exquisitely boring in its remoteness from ordinary feeling.
- Sheltered from wind, the water was glassy, and under a solidly gray sky it was absolutely black, pristinely black, like outer space. Amid the monochromes, the endless black and white and gray, was the jarring blue of glacial ice. No matter the shade of it—the bluish tinge of the growlers bobbing in our wake, the intensely deep blue of the arched and chambered floating ice castles, the Styrofoamish powder blue of calving glaciers—I couldn’t make my eyes believe that they were seeing a color from nature. Again and again, I nearly laughed in disbelief. Immanuel Kant had connected the sublime with terror, but as I experienced it in Antarctica, from the safe vantage of a ship with a glass-and-brass elevator and first-rate espresso, it was more like a mixture of beauty and absurdity.
- And here was an image so indelible that no camera was needed to capture it: the emperor penguin appeared to be holding a press conference. While a cluster of Adélies came up from behind it, observing like support staff, the emperor faced the press corps in a posture of calm dignity. After a while, it gave its neck a leisurely stretch. Demonstrating its masterly balance and flexibility, and yet without seeming to show off, it scratched behind its ear with one foot while standing fully erect on the other. And then, as if to underline how comfortable it felt with us, it fell asleep.
- When I sat on the ground, the king penguins came so close to me that I could have stroked their gleaming, furlike feathers. Their plumage had the hypercrispness of pattern, the hypervividness of color, that you can normally experience only by taking drugs.
__ “Dating is just for other people to know that you’re dating,” Sophia says. “People post about it all the time. Like kissing photos.” This seems to be the consensus across “American Girls.” It sounds familiar. “Men were only the gloves with which one slapped the face of girls,” says a character from a nineteen-twenties short story about college which Weigel quotes. “It was women one dueled.”
_______________________________
"A Full Revolution" / Reeves Wiedeman
- Karolyi seemed to make a brief attempt at finding a teachable moment before simply pulling Biles into her chest.
- When Biles lands on each of her tumbling runs, she hits the ground with the force of two colliding football players, and she spends many nights after practice in a pair of pants that massage her legs with compressed air. She compares the process of getting into shape for competition as “repeatedly convincing yourself you aren’t going to die.”
- The new vault requires Biles to twist in one direction while performing a roundoff, before immediately reversing course and twisting the opposite way into a back handspring. The combination seemed impossible, and I found myself watching a clip of the vault over and over to figure out how she had pulled it off without ripping apart her upper and lower halves.
"The Bank Robber" / Patrick Radden Keefe
__ Oswald Grübel, the chief executive of U.B.S., said, “If governments are in the market of buying illegal data, that changes the world.”
__ Government agreements with whistle-blowers often look morally confused. In 2009, Bradley Birkenfeld, the American banker who leaked documents about illegal activity at U.B.S., was sent to prison for his role in the conspiracy. He served two and a half years. (Though U.B.S. paid a fine, no other executive went to jail for the misconduct that Birkenfeld exposed.) Upon Birkenfeld’s release, he received a government reward of a hundred and four million dollars—the largest ever paid by the I.R.S.
"The Big Uneasy" / Nathan Heller
__ Oswald Grübel, the chief executive of U.B.S., said, “If governments are in the market of buying illegal data, that changes the world.”
__ Government agreements with whistle-blowers often look morally confused. In 2009, Bradley Birkenfeld, the American banker who leaked documents about illegal activity at U.B.S., was sent to prison for his role in the conspiracy. He served two and a half years. (Though U.B.S. paid a fine, no other executive went to jail for the misconduct that Birkenfeld exposed.) Upon Birkenfeld’s release, he received a government reward of a hundred and four million dollars—the largest ever paid by the I.R.S.
"The Big Uneasy" / Nathan Heller
- he argued that trigger warnings were like ingredient lists on food: “People should have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their minds, just as they have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their bodies.”
- He feels that he’s been drawn into a theatre of tokenism. “It’s always disappointing to be proof of concept for other people,” he told me.
- Today, they are told that they belong there, but they also must take on an extracurricular responsibility: doing the work of diversity. They move their lives to rural Ohio and perform their identities, whatever that might mean. They bear out the school’s vision. In exchange, they’re groomed for old-school entry into the liberal upper middle class. An irony surrounds the whole endeavor, and a lot of students seemed to see it.
"The Metamorphosis" / Joshua Rothman
__ He found that scents expand and contract with time and the weather. On cold, dry mornings, smells huddle close to their sources and the scent-world is low and compact. As the day warms, the smells swell and drift. (“Breast-high scent,” as hunters put it.) When it’s damp, the scent-world grows three-dimensional. For a badger, Foster surmises, smells form spatial structures with dimensions, boundaries, and interiors. On a warm day, a tree is “the helical shape of the scent vortex that pulls dust up into the canopy”; on a cold one, it becomes “a low hump of tart lichen with an indistinct chimney.” Approaching a dead animal is like walking deeper into a building. “A dead hedgehog is the shape of hedgehog, then the shape of green scent, then the shape of tripe, then the shape of sweet, then the shape of pork scratchings, then the shape of beetle.”
__ He found that scents expand and contract with time and the weather. On cold, dry mornings, smells huddle close to their sources and the scent-world is low and compact. As the day warms, the smells swell and drift. (“Breast-high scent,” as hunters put it.) When it’s damp, the scent-world grows three-dimensional. For a badger, Foster surmises, smells form spatial structures with dimensions, boundaries, and interiors. On a warm day, a tree is “the helical shape of the scent vortex that pulls dust up into the canopy”; on a cold one, it becomes “a low hump of tart lichen with an indistinct chimney.” Approaching a dead animal is like walking deeper into a building. “A dead hedgehog is the shape of hedgehog, then the shape of green scent, then the shape of tripe, then the shape of sweet, then the shape of pork scratchings, then the shape of beetle.”
