November 2011
18 posts
“And yet everything depends, of course, on defining fidelity. Nabokov’s...”
– Adam Thirlwell, who I don’t really know what he’s saying, but like it
“If capitalism has proved tolerable to the mass of workers over past centuries,...”
– Benjamin Kunkel
“The demands of the Occupy movement may be inchoate, or else conflicting. But it...”
– Gray
“Most poems are written by lovesick teenagers and lonely men. Their readership...”
– Guy Stagg calls it as he sees it
“To the Greeks, says Hölderlin, “holy pathos” and the Apollonian “fire from...”
– Coetzee on Hölderlin
“Humans seem prone to self-fulfilling waves of optimism and pessimism.”
– Wolf
“The only known massacre carried out during Gaddafi’s rule was the killing of...”
– Hugh Roberts
“There is no solution, no magic summit at hand. At this point, it is a choice...”
– Tim Duy
“There is nothing surprising in the fact that we strongly resist the implications...”
– Leszek Kołakowski
“Years later he was to say that he wrote all his books during his nightly walks...”
– Charles Simic on Cioran
“Experiments are under way to detect the tiny fraction of protons that decay in a...”
– Steven Weinberg
“My students tend to think that something is most potent when you’ve got a word...”
– Christopher Ricks
“Even worse, we don’t know what we don’t know.”
– William Easterly reviews Daniel Kahneman
“If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own...”
– Krugman
“If debt destruction were desired, the least damaging policy would be inflation....”
– Martin Wolf. If you follow the blogospheric Keynesians, you’ll frequently encounter them talking as though they were surprised that policymakers, too, are prey to that dread human thing, psychology. This or that technocratic solution would get us out of this mess, they insist, if only policymakers...
“It is rather clear that conventional oil is fated to peak (or plateau) and...”
– Tom Murphy
“The peak itself is nothing but fun!”
– Tom Murphy
Note on policy
Since the beginning of October and their conference and what with n quarters of discouraging numbers to their name I’ve noticed the Tories—in the justification of a policy of austerity—resorting more and more to the invocation of a threat. Which is that of the yieldspike. If you don’t swallow the cuts to make sure a yieldspike won’t happen, goes the argument, a...
