The Editors' Desk
“If this were a century and a half ago, I’d probably have opted to bring along a mule. Instead, I’ve got a baby stroller.”
—Print - Walking the Border - Esquire
April 2011
13 posts
“You need to have two wines, so instead of saying, ‘Do you like my wine?’ you can say, ‘Which of my wines do you prefer?’”
—Royal Wedding Wine May Be Bubbly and English - New York Times
“The only people with time to read are women and rich people.”
—In Which The Basic Reason Was William Faulkner Needed Money - Home - This Recording
“Our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that’s highly biased, especially on topics we care about.”
—The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science | Mother Jones
“You Big Lebowski’d me!” one of Ms. O’Rourke’s brothers yells… “I’m fine,” he says. “I just have Mom in my eyes.”
—‘Say Her Name’ and ‘The Long Goodbye’ - Book Review - NYTimes.com
“Covert action such as arming rebels has to be the thumb on the scale and not the hammer on the nail.”
—Former CIA director on the Agency’s role in the new Middle East – Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs
“You simply don’t go from being in a hospital bed to climbing 6500m peaks in just a few weeks.”
—Learning to fly – A tale of the battle against mountains and illness: guest post by Simon Overton | Rock Climbing UK
“We will picket her home. We’re going to make it clear that, until you do justice here, your life is going to be a living hell.”
—AOL-Huffpo Suit Seeks $105M: ‘This Is About Justice’ - Jeff Bercovici - Mixed Media - Forbes
Berenson, Part One: Lost in Kandahar - By Tom Ricks | The Best Defense →
ricks.foreignpolicy.com
Folks at Kandahar love proving that they’ve served in a war zone. The guys on the front lines, not so much.
“From space, one thing is clear: This planet isn’t so big that humans couldn’t destroy it with their greed for profit.”
—East German Cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn: ‘Capitalism Now Reigns in Space’ - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
“Wall Street has gone through multiple cycles of bubble and bust, followed by a startlingly quick return to normalcy.”
—The Wall Street Mind - The Psychology of the Triumphant Post-Crash Financier — New York Magazine
“John Galt, the shadowy genius who’s convincing the people who carry the world on their shoulders to go out on strike, is played, as far as I can tell, by a raincoat.”
—P.J. O’Rourke: Atlas Shrugged, And So Did I - WSJ.com
“Four men wading ashore wearing nothing but bathing trunks and German army hats looked like an unlikely invading force.”
—British spy files shed light on Nazi saboteurs - Yahoo! News
March 2011
37 posts
“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
“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.
