May 2011
46 posts
“And it got worse – the oxygen in the world started to disappear and no one knew...”
– Curtis on Biosphere 2
“In fact, one of the attractions of a life that is mediated through computers may...”
– Gray
“So the meaning of a law about secrets is hidden because the government’s view of...”
– Bromwich
“And so something has really changed […]: the ways in which culture is...”
– Kenneth Goldsmith
“There was desperation in Monday night’s display of air power over Tripoli,...”
– Jenkins
“I am so thrown by the unpleasantness of all this I don’t even interject.”
– Hari
“As he walked slowly out of the hall, something happened I’ve never seen...”
– Simon Carr
“Hill spoke deliberately slowly so I can’t miss or mistake a word. He is also...”
– Jessica Campbell
“Here, the stakes are so much higher, all the power and wealth and imperial might...”
– Mark Ames misses Russia
“In the darkness, we can at least see that we can see nothing.”
– Edmund Hardy
“In real time and space, you can’t explicitly keep track of how often someone...”
– Rob Horning with a piece to reread. (But not so much ‘attention’ as ‘approval’, ‘affirmations’?)
“But we’re not so wicked that we lack sufficient will to overcome injustice...”
– Will Wilkinson might only add ‘Are we?’ to get the correct tone
“And that’s the ideology that appears again and again in Infinite Jest – drugs...”
– Ramon Glazov with a rant you shouldn’t read
“Economists said the figures were a surprising disappointment.”
– the BBC makes a joke
“The unpleasant truth is that there’s probably not a great deal rich...”
– David Roberts
“Oh God, I woke up this morning because I had a dream about David Cameron. I was...”
– Emmy the Great
Watchcough
'To write well you need consistently to alienate...
“When I see my image reflected on a mirror behind a bar I think, Oh good, I look...”
– Autumn Whitefield-Madrano
“In the eyes of these people, Mao Zedong is someone for whom criticism is...”
– Mao Yushi
“In Puritan America, impregnated with rigorous Protestantism, they tolerate...”
– Gilles Savary (tr. Adam Gopnik)
“In general, though, you seldom hear people praising the human capacity for love...”
– Erica Grieder
“If you look at what these people say, they’ve taken to putting scare quotes...”
– PK
Brightnesse falls from the ayre,
On Twitter last Monday I did an improvised sounding of a line from Nashe and bungled it and I want to make it right. Famous for its resonance—for possessing the kind of beauty which excerption seems to enhance—the line occurs in the third stanza of the lyric ‘Adieu, farewell earths blisse’ from Summers last will and Testament (1600) and I haven’t looked up how the...
“There is, of course, a difference between deliberately targeting civilians and...”
– Glenn Greenwald saying something like what I was saying here
“But do we really want our higher education system redesigned by the...”
– William Deresiewicz
“No 10 has just called in one of the wisest NHS analysts, Prof Alan Maynard, who...”
– says Toynbee and we shouldn’t overlook the question whether the reasons why the British left has long exhibited deficiencies of strategy in contention with the right—and when it hasn’t, its strategists have had their loyalties put under unbiddable scrutiny, its policies been at...
“The modern myth is that with the acceptance of science one set of values will be...”
– John Gray, Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern. ‘Can we not accept […] and learn to live’ – this sounds remarkably like an exhortation in a moral spirit – conveying the sort of ethical force to permit the subtitution of ‘We should’ for ‘Can we not’ –...
“From the beginning, it has been taken for granted that protecting the population...”
– Larison
“More than once, I ask the business secretary whether he regards David Cameron...”
– Andrew Rawnsley
“On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract people – you are dancing...”
– Katherine Viner interviews Adam Curtis
“Suffice it to say that if we mean to avoid increased starvation and...”
– Jeremy Grantham
“I find it striking that the two most popular and workable alternatives to fossil...”
– Tyler Cowen
“When we add all this up we also know, if we are being honest with ourselves,...”
– Paul Kingsnorth
“We have no idea what to do next.”
– Monbiot who seems to be saying that the Greens have sabotaged themselves by submitting in the discourse and drift of their arguments to economics, which has become capitalism’s house science. The question of questions: Is a Green capitalism possible?
“There’s an uncanny stillness to Obama’s features. One senses that he...”
– Caleb Crain
“She still thought it was a sign of social bravery to be a crude-talking,...”
– David Brooks!
“I’m human, after all. But I know how things start, and I know that, within...”
– deBoer
“In the first instance, Pakistan has to lie to enable the U.S. government to...”
– Mosharraf Zaidi
“So many awful things have happened in the battles to find this man, so many...”
– ‘Thoreau’
“He wants us to return to a pre-Renaissance world and find the shared...”
– Nick Cohen
April 2011
32 posts
“The central western traditions which, following Nietzsche, Rorty so bracingly...”
– John Gray, ‘Ironies of Liberal Postmodernity’, Endgames 