Monday, October 4, 2021
I don't like to dwell on crits after the thing is made. I like to do in progress crits so the thing can change.
— Janet*
Sunday, October 3, 2021
The entire facility fell under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, located in Huntsville, Alabama. There, a lieutenant colonel named Tim Mango had responsibility for Kwajalein. This tickled Musk. “What are the odds?” he asked. “I sometimes wonder if it’s like Catch-22 where there’s somebody doing assignments for majors and colonels, and they said you know what would be funny? If we took Lieutenant Colonel Mango and put him in charge of a tropical island.”
— Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX
Saturday, October 2, 2021
The material of a conventional monument is normally chosen to withstand the physical ravages of time, the assumption being that its memory will remain as everlasting as its form. But as Mumford has already suggested, the actual consequence of a memorial's unyielding fixedness in space is also its death over time: a fixed image created in one time and carried over into a new time suddenly appears archaic, strange, or irrelevant altogether.
— James E. Young, "The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today"
Friday, October 1, 2021
A much larger and more pertinent big idea which neither Petraeus nor any other outsider could ultimately control, was the identity and interests of the foreign country's ruling elite. If that idea and those interest obstructed the regime's willingness or ability to govern it's people with legitimacy, and if the intervening power had little leverage to alter this fact, then as David Kilcullen conlcuded in the end, it was folly to embark on a counter insurgency campaign in the first place.
— Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
Thursday, September 30, 2021
Nagl and Yingling had written in their article, "The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion."
— Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
But he also wanted an opportunity—and there were few more captivating opportunities than an airplane ride—to talk with her.
— Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
What the infographic era signifies is the transformation of politics into aesthetics and those aesthetics into the same type of brand building content that previously thrived on selfies and Bruch posts. The reason infographics are so perfectly suited for influencers in an attention economy that runs on authenticity is precisely because they pretend to be a break from branded content. It’s as if to say “hey guys, I know I talk about a lot of silly things on here, but today lets talk about something real.” All the while, the engagement stats keep going up, and trust is established through the influencer's benevolent willingness to break character. It’s this routine of piety and self-sacrifice, the creation of a moral order where ‘actually some things are bigger than content’ that allows infographics to function so effectively as content.
— Brad Troemel, "PASTEL HELL: the definitive guide to millennial aesthetics"
Monday, September 27, 2021
You even take away from the opponent the piece they love to hate. They need that piece.
— Person in The Trial of Tilted Arc
Sunday, September 26, 2021
9ATM50
— License Plate
Saturday, September 25, 2021
Bill Aguado says that in the South Bronx the community too often means the people who see a chance to get involved and win.
— Jane Kramer, "Whose Art Is It?," The New Yorker
Friday, September 24, 2021
I interviewed Annie Wang on her seminal series Mother as a Creator
— @gongjongong
Thursday, September 23, 2021
In one of his earlier ceremonies, Petraeus had learned that Iraquis didn't quite believe an agreement was real unless it was stamped with an official seal. So he had some of his men design a seal, sending them into the local bazaar to find popular emblems and symbols with which to embroider it.
— Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
Wednesday, September 22, 2021
"Lessons of history" can be "misleading," he went on. It was well understood that the Cold Warriors of the early 1960s had distorted history when they likened the communist assult on South Vietnam to Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland or Czechoslovakia. Now, he wrote, the military cheifs of the mid-1980s were similarly "myopic" in seeing every third-world crisis as another Vietnam. He quoted Mark Twain on the broad issue of lessons: "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."
— Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
MKULTRA was so highly classified that when John McCone succeeded Dulles as CIA director in late 1961, he was not informed of its existance. Fewer than half a dozen agency brass were aware of MKULTRA at any period during it's twenty-year history.
— Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
Monday, September 20, 2021
WHERE THE STATION IS THE DESTINATION
— Café la France's Providence train station location tagline
Sunday, September 19, 2021
See I memorize things as my job, so when you can't remember one thing I find it amusing.
— Lily
Saturday, September 18, 2021
At least six purple houses.
— Lily on bike counting purple houses
Friday, September 17, 2021
As artist Joe Hanson suggests, "Much of what has been called public art might better be defined as private indulgence."
— Suzanne Lacy, "Cultural Pilgrimates and Metaphoric Journeys," Mapping The Terrain: New Genre Public Art
Thursday, September 16, 2021
It was more about the way that events, in all their messy reality, boiled down to the canonical fact. The way that a narrative becomes the narative.
— Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
I moved so much that I stopped collecting things.
— Sun Ho*