The upper middle brow possesses excellence, intelligence, and integrity. It is genuinely good work (as well as being most of what I read or look at myself). The problem is it always lets us off the hook… it is ultimately designed to flatter its audience, approving our feelings and reinforcing our prejudices. It stays within …
Tag Archive: Quote
Nov 08 2012
Behold the New Jerusalem
… make no mistake: Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. …
Nov 08 2012
Hollow tower of hubris
Romney was also no doubt dragging his heels because, as he confidently told journalists earlier Tuesday, “I just finished writing a victory speech. It’s about 1,118 words.” He added, just to drive the point home, “I’ve only written one speech at this point.” Barack Obama, meanwhile, aware of how tight the race was right up …
Nov 06 2012
Please don’t.
For the press corps, there was no power; at first, there weren’t even any chairs. But none of those things were what made the wait unbearable. That honor belonged to the warm-up act, the ever-execrable Dave Matthews, who at one point uttered a sentence that, coming from him, was so horrific it chills my soul …
Nov 06 2012
A man in full
One of the few things that Christie and Obama share is a palpable sense that their political opponents are lesser men, though in Obama this exhibits itself as an airy idealism and in Christie as an all-encompassing disgust. What the president’s embrace gave Christie was a grand identity—a national leader, bigger than politics—that for once …
Nov 06 2012
Never saw us coming
To my fellow seculars, skeptics, humanists, and nonbelievers, the political class did not see us coming. For decades, maybe centuries, they’ve been avoiding us, ignoring us, or outright reviling us. And then one day in October, they realized that they couldn’t do that anymore. It’s Time to Represent: Election Day for America’s Seculars and Skeptics …
Nov 04 2012
They just hate computers
This is a sentiment you often hear from people: casual users only need «entry-level» performance. Even casual users themselves perpetuate it: «Oh, I’m not doing much on my computer, so I always just go with the cheapest option.» And then they buy a horrid, underpowered netbook, find out that it has a tiny screen, is …
Oct 29 2012
The belligerent South
Anthropologists have long noted that societies that herd livestock in rugged terrain tend to develop a “culture of honor.” Since their wealth has feet and can be stolen in an eye blink, they are forced to deter rustlers by cultivating a hair-trigger for violent retaliation against any trespass or insult that probes their resolve. Farmers …
Oct 28 2012
This store contains no elephants
The Surface is partially for Microsoft’s world of denial: the world in which this store contains no elephants and Microsoft invented the silver store with the glass front and the glowing logo and blue shirts and white lanyards and these table layouts and the modern tablet and its magnetic power cable. In that world, this …
Oct 25 2012
Fired from the polity
Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity. The New Yorker’s Endorsement of Barack Obama : The New Yorker
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