“When in downtown Prague, the drunken American exchange students you are bound to run into are as real as anybody else.”
—Searching for Authenticity : Bachelors of the Arts: Eligible Criticism
March 2011
37 posts
“I have a sneaking suspicion that the food here is being spiked with some kind of sedative.”
—In Libyan Capital, Reporters Encounter The Surreal | WBUR & NPR
“I feel quite a fiery impulse within me to teach the French more fully how to know and value and fear the Germans.”
—Clear-Sighted Ambition - Lapham’s Quarterly
“I’m willing to bet $100 that books about boy wizards are more likely to become bestsellers than books about equations.”
—The Anti-Predictor: A Chat with Mathematical Sociologist Duncan Watts: Scientific American
“Anyone seen moshing during George Clinton’s performance will be put in the penalty box.”
—Mosh Pit Do’s and Don’ts for Lollapalooza 94 (via Lollapalooza 20th Anniversary Time Capsule)
“Crying is useless. If we’re in hell now all we can do is to crawl up towards heaven.”
—Letters from Fukushima: Tepco Worker Emails - Japan Real Time - WSJ
"I don’t know. I’ve lost maybe a million, a million point two over the past few days to Gus. Something like that.”
Having recounted his own remarkable story of poker addiction, Jay Caspian Kang spends time with Online Poker’s Big Winner in a Times Magazine piece about young online poker millionaries. Video games like Command and Conquer taught one of the highest-flying poker princes the manual dexterity necessary to play up to 20 high-stakes games at once, winning and losing millions of dollars in the process.
A Flip-Flop of Nuclear Proportions for Merkel
Germany is winging in on foreign policy and risks being isolated internationally after rejecting U.N. action in Libya—but as part of NATO, they’re now contributing money. This weekend, Merkel’s CDU lost an election in a rich conservative heartland, having held power there for 58 years. A Green Party coalition took power, thanks in part to Merkel’s flip-flop on nuclear power following Fukushima.
“People just love to watch a couple of dumb kids make out and die.”
—Block Quote: How Shakespeare Invented Teenagers - New York Times
“Eric Schadt wants not just to remake the underpinnings of biological science but rather to remake science itself.”
—Eric Schadt Profile - Interview with Eric Schadt Pacific Biosciences - Esquire
“No, no! It’s the new kinder gentler Dale Peck, we don’t rant any more!”
—FT.com / Books - ‘Readers of the world unite’
“If Kate Middleton were American, she would be from somewhere like Darien, or Westport, or the horsier parts of New Jersey.”
—Why Kate Middleton Is About to Become the Commonest Future Queen in History — New York Magazine
“You might as well go outside, because, if something is wrong, you might really freak out and you’re in the library.”
—Weekly Review—By Claire Gutierrez (Harper’s Magazine)
“A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami….Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.”
— Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power - The Guardian
“I can tell you the last time someone picked up the phone when I called, Mary Roach said. It was two months ago, I said: Whoa!”
—Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You - NYTimes.com
“If Libya today, why not Bahrain tomorrow? At what point do such attacks on civilians cross a threshold of unacceptability?”
—Libya military action: live updates | World news | guardian.co.uk
“Neocons are paving the road to a kind of soft despotism that might even lead one day to a type of fascism.”
—Neoconservatism Unmasked | Thompson C. Bradley | Cato Unbound
“Sporting a scruffy beard, ironic glasses and a track-suit jacket, he is most definitely the trial’s Hipster Juror.”
—The Snooze Moment in the Galleon Trial - NYTimes.com
“All told, an estimated 2,405 Americans have been shot and killed since Tucson”
—2,405 Shot Dead Since Tucson - Newsweek
“the current $90 rate for a human slave is actually at an historic low. Two hundred years ago, a slave cost about $40,000…”
—Cost of slaves falls to historic low – Business 360 - CNN.com Blogs
