A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.
~ Yonatan Touval via The New York Times
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Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay
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Since the 1990s, political parties across the West have been hemorrhaging members amid a wider weakening of internal structures. While especially damaging on the left, always reliant on popular support, the trend affected forces across the spectrum. As a void opened between voters and parties, many citizens stopped engaging with them and even decided to opt out of voting altogether. The result has been a steady erosion of mainstream parties’ electoral support.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times
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University of the Fraser Valley
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via McCombs School of Business
Obedience to Authority | Concepts Unwrapped
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University of North Carolina at Asheville
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In October 2025, Beijing significantly expanded its export controls on rare earths and for the first time publicly asserted extraterritorial jurisdiction, requiring foreign exporters to obtain Chinese government approval to export items containing even trace amounts of Chinese-origin rare earths, including goods manufactured entirely outside China.38 Those controls have since been partially suspended following bilateral negotiations, but the architecture remains in place and can be reactivated. Apple’s iPhones contain dysprosium in their vibration motors and a range of other rare earth elements in their displays and speakers. Moving the final assembly out of China does nothing to address that dependency.
~ Isaac Stone Fish via American Affairs
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In the realm of sports talk, kindness is unrelatable; it’s alien, even. What’s relatable is irrationally caring for your team and irrationally hating its rivals—not pandering by saying that you happen to like all of the teams in key Rust Belt swing states.
~ Nathaniel Frum via The Atlantic
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After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, Jacqueline, alert with a widow’s sense of history management, spun in Life magazine the myth of Camelot.
~ Doreen St. Félix via The New Yorker
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