June 2009
18 posts
summblr vacation
I will not be reading or writings tumbls until some time in August. Be safe, kids.
Away We Go
magicmolly:
I didn’t enjoy Away We Go, the movie directed by Sam Mendes and written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, but I admired it sincerely.
Reasons I didn’t enjoy it include:
•Irksome forced-quirkiness and immaturity on the part of the two main characters, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph.
•A dreary aesthetic.
It is never pleasant to spend time with characters whose primary...
“Look, we enter the government essentially in a hotel that is on fire. We’re...”
– Austan Goolsbee defends the administration’s economic policy. “We enter the government essentially in a hotel that is on fire.”
paradoxical undressing (via Kottke) →
“What is certain, however, is that metaphor is always a dangerous servant; on its...”
– Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power, p. 64
not to be too cutesy
Looking over my bookshelves, I remembered that I accidentally shoplifted this volume a couple of years ago:
I guess that’s what they call primitive accumulation.
(Marx: Jesus, Proudhon, this tea is unspeakable! Proudhon: Of course, Karl — proper tea is theft. (Apparently this joke is due to the cartoonist Martin Rowson, though I first heard it from David Armitage.))
“In practice, the people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality,...”
–
EY. I’m not sure those two things are as similar as he implies… (via keyholez)
Yeah, I would say there are people with “unusually bad social skills” who are not the least bit interested in rationality or even honesty. Sociopaths, etc.
(via derrinyet)
Oh, don’t sell yourself short,...
“In practice, the people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality,...”
– EY. I’m not sure those two things are as similar as he implies…
“And even though they express themselves with a measure of diffidence, it’s clear...”
– Is AO Scott writing about a movie, or is he writing about YOU?
THINK ABOUT IT.
(via katiebakes)
I feel like I have infinitely many things to say about the review, and probably the movie too, should I ever see it. Let’s start here:
Is it just me, or is hipsterdom’s biological clock...
sound familiar, tumblrs?
In the context of the French Revolution, a venal office refers to an office sold by the state to raise money. These offices, which were mostly in areas of the judicial system, were retained in exchange for an annual tax of one-sixtieth of the value known as the paulette.
These offices provided access to power and opportunities for profit for the wealthy nobles who bought them. The more...
“Following the passage of the Convertible Bank Note Regulations…the Bank of...”
“On the factory’s fourth floor, all day every day, objects with the...”
– WSJ
“…as for the graphic-design tropes - didn’t America just basically...”
– Mencius Moldbug (in the comments)
“As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped as by monks who treated him...”
– Guardian
“Simon Johnson chides the administr8n 4 wasting a crisis.Way 2...”
– Interfluidity on Twitter, 5/27/2009
“Another year, at what the Breitling people call their “terrorist...”
– Patricia Marx, “Face Value,” The New Yorker, May 25, 2009, pp. 35-6. I forgot how much I enjoyed The New Yorker.