The Bolsheviks had an ideology, a plan to destroy the old social order and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. But a motley array of other people—advocates of free love, avant-garde painters, grifters fleecing ex-aristocrats—took advantage of the chaos to promote their own agendas. Different kinds of revolutionaries are now pushing the “Make America Great Again” movement in different directions too.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don’t like that, then tough tills, don’t go and see it, all right? I steal from everything.
~ Quentin Tarantino
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All of history’s previous superpowers have eventually declined. The emergence of East Asia as the center of the world’s economic output was always going to reduce American influence. The transition from one global age to the next is seldom evident in the moment.
~ Phillips Payson O’Brien via The Atlantic
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Once matter passes through the bowels, the effectiveness of the anal sphincter is also thought to be affected by intense exercise. The sphincter has two rings — first, a less powerful, outer, voluntary ring, and second, a more powerful, inner, involuntary ring. As other parts of the body are prioritised during all-out efforts, this involuntary ring weakens — and triggers the final, messy repercussion of faecal incontinence.
~ Jacob Whitehead via The Athletic
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The Air Force sees autonomous drones as a low-cost way to address an immediate problem: its dwindling number of fighter jets. The service now has about 5,000 aircraft — fewer than at any point in its 79-year history — many of which aren’t battle-ready.
~ W.J. Hennigan via The New York Times
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It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.
~ Tyler Durden
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The natural world may be mesmerizing, but it doesn’t offer a reliable guide to what is—or should be—socially acceptable. While copulating, female praying mantises often kill their mates and eat them. I understand the impulse, but I try to stop myself.
~ Elizabeth Kolbert via The New Yorker
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The newsiness of the crimes in A Violent Masterpiece makes it feel contemporary, but the look and feel of the city—seen, so often, from behind the windshield of a car—also makes the novel a robust story of place. Noir thrives on style, on sensibility, and on situated-ness. Sure, there are bits of classic James Ellroy here: chopped sentences, words italicized for emphasis. Harper has incorporated these tropes in Jake’s narration, and it reads both old and new. The old, in this case, is peak Ellroy.
~ Carolyn Kellogg via The Atlantic
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Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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Among the people, democracy is thriving. After decades of decline in voter turnout, there has been a steep and steady rise in participation over the past 20 years — at least for parties whose candidates reflect a genuine popular sentiment. As this has happened, liberal commentators — who tend to back what Wolfgang Streeck calls “parties of the standard model” — have changed their definition of democracy, he writes: They see high electoral participation as a troubling expression of discontent, “endangering rather than strengthening democracy.”
~ Christopher Caldwell
via This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
published by The New York Times on November 28, 2024
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