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The united nations of stupidity
I think this is less true in the era of memoir and blogging, but I will always prefer conscious foolishness to blind faith.
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The wages of immortality
From Wikipedia: “In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15, on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century…The book outsold all Woolf’s previous novels, and the proceeds enabled the Woolfs to buy a cat.”
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How bad is it? Give me a sign…
If there’s one thing about the collapse in the U.S. media’s credibility and sustainability that disturbs me most (aside from its effects on my own potential income), it’s that I can’t tell how deep the crazy in today’s politics really runs. Like in this NYT Tea Party article here. Excellent feature, but it doesn’t really…
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Somebody has to do it
A man in a puffy tan jacket stops in front of the memorial commemorating the night the wall fell. It is difficult to determine his age under his white knit hat, but bits of gray hair and a roughness to his cold-chapped skin mark him as old enough to remember the night the barricades had…
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Libertarian paternalism, or: Gov’t out of my idiocy!
Here in this article is the future of political conflict. “Libertarian paternalism” against a theory of human existence based on the supremacy of reason and rational choice. Choose your sides now. A bit of background: In the economics world, behavioral economics is aimed at looking at how people actually make choices, instead of assuming that…
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We, the machine, can write like the wind
Another reminder that the market is sometimes bad for humans. Or writers (and probably readers), in this case. According to the NYT, Tina Brown is hot on creating a new publishing imprint that will rush books to market just a few months — one to three for writing, another one or two for editing and…
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Thinking like a novelist, not a theorist
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article well worth reading start to finish on the legacy of cultural studies. A plea for treating your ideological opponents in a non-condescending way, and trying thusly to understand why they think what they think. I would say this is thinking like a novelist (and thus holistically)…
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Wanted: A new political left
After four years of uncomfortable Grand Coalition, Germany’s center-right party — or more exactly, Angela Merkel, the only really popular politician here — is finally getting to lead more or less the way it wants. This has fairly widely been dubbed the most boring election in history. Which — aren’t we in the middle of…
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How to find a bus in Bucharest
We arrive in Bucharest at midday. We are only passing through; we have two options for catching a bus north to Sibiu, over the Făgăraş mountains. One option is very soon, the other gives us slightly more time. It seems simple: A taxi driver waves to us after we have found our ATM machine, and…
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Observations 3: (Kopenhagener Str.)
A red station wagon screeches to a halt in the middle of the intersection. A young man leans out the driver’s window, shouting furious English-language obscenities at the top of his lungs. “You goddamn bitch, you fucking piece of fucking.… I should fucking…aaaaAAAHHHHHH…” He pulls his head back inside, throwing the car into reverse. A…
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Observations 1: (Schönfließer Str.)
A shoemaker’s shop. Custom-made, fashionable leather orthopedic shoes are displayed in a row behind the glass window. The shoemaker and his partner, a young man and woman, stand relaxed in the doorway. He wears a shirt with white-and-blue horizontal stripes, giving him the look of a French sailor, or a waiter on San Francisco’s Belden…
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Reading Gyula Krúdy
A bit of cross-blog pollination. A friend and I are doing periodic posts on things we happen to be reading. Here’s the latest, on Gyula Krúdy, a pre-WWII (and mostly pre-WWI) Hungarian writer sweet as summer berries, and deeper than he appears at first. Gyula Krúdy: Seduction and Innocence
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Stalin in Iran
Stunning how completely the Iranian trials replicate their Soviet models. From Juan Cole, quoting a translation of official Iran news radio: Asked if his current position was under the effect of his imprisonment, (former vice president Mohammad Ali) Abtahi said the situation in the prison helped him to reach a conclusion about the recent incidents.…
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On being from somewhere, but writing from/of everywhere
Joseph O’Neill, as part of the Atlantic’s four-part Border Crossings collection of essays: There is a venerable tradition of being critical of nationalism and its assumptions. Nationalism proposes that a person’s freedom is justly maximized if the obligations limiting that freedom are set by the group with which he has most in common—i.e., his nation.…
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Blogging the National Book Award’s winners
This is like blog candy. Or no, not candy, more like a wine club, where something new and delectable comes in the mail whether you’ve remembered to look for it or not, and it might not be to your liking but it will always be worth tasting… Or something. In any case. The folks who…