Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Mr. Navalny said. “We are specific, like any nation."
— Andrew E. Kramer, "In First Interview From Jail, an Upbeat Navalny Discusses Prison Life," The New York Times
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
I said, "Why have you left out the grapes?"
Ike said, "Because they're too God-damned hard to paint."
— John McPhee, Draft No. 4
Monday, August 23, 2021
All this can happen because the Essays has no great meaning, no point to make, no argument to advance. It does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it.
— Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Sunday, August 22, 2021
Tyrannafying!
— Isaac mixing "Tyrannosaurus" and "terrifying"
Saturday, August 21, 2021
Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it "will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed . . . silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an expontential explosion of errata."
— John McPhee, Draft No. 4
Friday, August 20, 2021
The Taliban co-founder
— New York Times photo caption
Thursday, August 19, 2021
I'm so excited I get to share with you my favorite thing about People magazine's 9/11 coverage...
The ad placement!!!
— @emily_elsie
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
She said, "Now, we're just here to be memories for our kids."
— Matthew McConaughey, Interstellar
Tuesday, August 17, 2021
By 2018, manipulation of the platform [Twitter] in Saudi Arabia was so great it was hard to determine what was real human activity
— Ben Hubbard, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman
Monday, August 16, 2021
What a lesson in culture. Money, weapons, technlogy, external resources, etc cannot create an effective army without a strong culture. A lesson often learned the hard way but broadly applicable. No easy playbook for building culture.
— D*
Sunday, August 15, 2021
WHAT'S AUTHENTIC?
— @stephaniehshih quoting LA Times headline
Saturday, August 14, 2021
In 2010 I moved into an unoccupied house in Bayview, San Francisco that had been a semi-secret neighborhood gambling shack for 40 years. It took me about 3 days to realize that Bayview was the best place I ever lived. In 2017 my marvelous art-school teaching colleague George McCalman (@tuffgee) told me he was designing a series of posters featuring Bayview residents. (Was it an art project? An ad campaign? I never asked and I still don’t really know.) George knew I loved Bayview and invited me to have my picture taken for the series by his friend Jason Madara (@jasonmadarastudio). I said sure, why not. A casual thing, no payment. A year later, hundreds of “I AM BAYVIEW” posters appeared suddenly on bus stops & train stops all over the city. Of the 40 or so Bayview people featured on 30-ish different posters, I think I was the only white guy. A few days after the posters went up, an anti-gentrification Facebook group took a snapshot of just the poster featuring my face and made it their profile picture, captioning the image “shame is dead.” This post was viewed & hate-shared thousands of times, spawning anger across social media. Much of the internet commentary was along the lines of “Who the HELL is this entitled tech-bro douchebag and where the HELL does he get off claiming HE IS BAYVIEW?” (That’s a paraphrase.) I remember feeling sad about the anger, but also getting it. (The phrase “I am Bayview” is not something I had ever said or would ever say. Nor was I aware that this phrase would appear on the poster. And I know I look like a dork because spoiler alert: I Am A Dork.) I remember wishing that everyone could know the full story behind the posters. I remember wishing that positive attention could be paid to the 96% of Bayview residents on the posters who are not white. I remember wondering: How much money went into this massive campaign? Who paid out that money and who got paid? What were the agendas of the project, explicit and implicit, and whose agendas were they? Was it considered a success by all? Some? None? At the peak of the hubbub, I took my 9-year-old son on a walk to look at & ponder one of the vandalized posters. These photos are from that walk.
— @mcmubria
Friday, August 13, 2021
A fossil word is a word that is broadly obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom.
— Wikipedia via @huffmatt via @depthsofwikipedia
Thursday, August 12, 2021
The Space Shuttle had almost no room for iteration because there were people on board. So you couldn't be blowing up shuttles. So that's a big problem.
— Elon Musk, "Starbase Tour with Elon Musk [PART 2], Everyday Astronaut
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
To some extent, a news story doesn’t feel real until it’s been replied to with an endless series of memes reflecting all the different hot takes that are possible.
— Brad Troemel, Replacement Theory: How memes rendered commercial art obsolete
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
He complained that "the Americans have great accumulated expertise of photography of the region due to the fact that they have been doing it for so many years. They can even distinguish between houses that are frequented by male visitors at a higher rate than is normal."
— Peter L. Bergen, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
Monday, August 9, 2021
THE CORICANCHA, one of Cusco’s most mesmerizing megalithic sites, features this finger-tip-sized precision stone.
— @accidentalmystery
Sunday, August 8, 2021
As the historian Brian Dippie has astutely observed, "the belief in the Vanishing Indian was the ultimate cause of the Indian's vanishing." Metamora was just one of dozens if not hundreds of literary productions by which the fate of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Seminoles, Creeks, and Chickasaws was made acceptable to the American public by virtue of its very inevitability.... Did they suspect that white New Englanders' valuable opposition to Indian removal depended on the illusion that there were no more Indians in New England?
— Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
Saturday, August 7, 2021
Elaine Scarry has argued that the lingering evidence of a war's destruction documents and reinforces its ending: "The very endurance of the record partly explains why the outcome is abided by."
— Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
Friday, August 6, 2021
“They’ve been selling privacy to the world and making people trust their devices,” Mr. Green said. “But now they’re basically capitulating to the worst possible demands of every government. I don’t see how they’re going to say no from here on out.”
— Jack Nicas, "Apple’s iPhones Will Include New Tools to Flag Child Sexual Abuse," The New York Times
