One important—maybe the most important—thing about noir is that it can’t get by on plot alone. Almost every page of A Violent Masterpiece has a spark and crackle of language, detail, idea.
~ Carolyn Kellogg via The Atlantic
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Yet underlying all of the outbreaks, and even gun and opioid deaths, is a common theme: a declining sense of mutual responsibility among Americans. If the population could be analogized to a single human body, then its immune system would rely on a concert of action and purpose between each cell. When that concert stops, the body dies.
~ Vann Newkirk via The Atlantic
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George S. Brown – the American four-star general who served as the 8th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the 8th Chief of Staff of the Air Force – was born on this day – August 17, 1918 – in McAlister, Oklahoma.
He was a graduate of the United States Military Academy and the National War College.
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It’s jarring to think that our age—unlike our height or weight—can’t be precisely measured. One can count the rings on a tree to calculate how many years it was alive, but there’s no equivalent marker in humans. Every so often, in the hospital where I work, I notice that a patient has a listed age of more than a hundred and twenty. This is disorienting until I realize that the patient may have come into the hospital with no I.D. and no known contacts, and that they might be suffering from a condition—dementia, schizophrenia—that makes it hard for them to remember who they are, let alone how old. In such cases, the hospital’s computer system defaults to a birth year of 1900.
~ Dhruv Khullar via The New Yorker
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via The New York Times:
Police in India Use Tear Gas to Break Up Another Youth Protest
by Anupreeta Das
published on August 10, 2026
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For years, China’s rising power has rested on a fragile balance of economic freedom and political control, in what early Party reformers called the “birdcage economy”—airy enough to allow enterprises to thrive, but not capacious enough to sacrifice power. That arrangement has rarely looked more tenuous.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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The Only Living Pickpocket in New York featuring Tatiana Maslany, John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, and Steve Buscemi. Distributed by Sony Pictures.
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