Serious reflexion about one’s own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him.
~ Iris Murdoch
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Monthly Archives: May 2024
Microsoft acquired Skype on this day in 2011
Microsoft aquired Skype on this day – May 10 – in 2011.
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Tate Modern Gallery
turns 24 today
The Tate Modern Gallery in London, England was opened on this day – May 11 – in 2000.
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In a world that otherwise values competition, effort, and merit, the British have allowed their state to be governed by the purest chance. It seems like a formula for disaster. Instead, it has produced 350 years of constitutional stability.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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There are no holidays for art; and that’s just fine with the artist.
~ Elfriede Jelinek
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Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
~ John Steinbeck
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It is clear by now that the mental-health crisis has changed academia forever: its structures, its culture and the function it is expected to perform in American society. More than half of American college students now report depression, anxiety or seriously considering suicide. This is a problem that reaches across geography, race, class, identity, institutional resources or prestige and academic ability. Almost one in four Americans in college considered dropping out in the last year because of their mental health. Adjusting pedagogy to account for this scale of illness and, in some cases, disability, is the new frontier of postsecondary education.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine
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The sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly.
~ Charles Dickens
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The successful use of competition as the principle of social organization precludes certain types of coercive interference with economic life, but it admits of others which sometimes may very considerably assist its work and even requires certain kinds of government action. But there is good reason why the negative requirements, the points where coercion must not be used, have been particularly stressed.
~ Friedrich Hayek
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Israel is justified by being a sovereign state that commands the loyalty of its citizens, not by the precedents of antiquity. Ditto for the United States and every other state, whatever the nature of its origins. History is lived forward, not back, and the goal of politics and diplomacy is to make life as livable for as many people as possible, not to re-adjudicate ancient rights or wrongs.
~ Brett Stephens via The New York Times
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