In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.
Susan Sontag's contribution to Talk of the Town the week after 9/11 for The New Yorker
Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark.
"The Worst Day Of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction", Steve Kandell for Buzzfeed News
Monetary economists can sometimes make a fetish of discomfort.
The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money, Brendan Greeley
Finished reading this in the hospital waiting room while my mom did radiation treatments this week. Runner-up sentences:
He is solid, in a way that suggests he knows how a hammer works.
Ask about the town's origins, and you will inevitably hear about the theft.
Charlie Kirk is the Harambe of Gen Alpha
Title of an essay by Ryan Broderick for his newsletter Garbage Day
Perfect in a terrible way.
Everything changes when you bring in a big handbag.
Linda Evangelista discussing Carrie Mae Weems' photo series for Bottega Veneta in The New York Times Style Magazine
Submitted by Max.
A new study shows that little, wrinkly Mercury may be shrinking faster than expected, the cosmos' version of a grape shriveling into a raisin under the sun.
Post by NBC10 Boston on Bluesky
Best of all, Wife is politically correct because she breaks a writer's "direct dependence on strip-mined coal."
Letter by Gordon Inkeles in response to Wendell Berry's "Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer"
Submitted by Kira.
This is, of course, also, about whiteness, as so many stories about the Bay Area dance around how much they actually are.
"Herb Caen in Oakland", Aaron Bady for Oakland Review of Books
That phenomenon of making the orange skies look clear on a phone camera is called “auto-white balance,” the Atlantic explained helpfully, two days after I was nearly driven mad.
"The orange skies have faded. But Orange Skies Day is forever", Peter Hartlaub for San Francisco Chronicle
Submitted by Steen.
And I welcome AI to replace all the idiots who are into nothing but repeating, repeating, repeating until it’s ad nauseam.
Werner Herzog in an interview with IndieWire
(Rationalists, like termites, live in eusocial mounds.)
"Child's Play", Sam Kriss for Harper's
We bear the nineteenth century like an incubus.
Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons, Charles Tilly
Via Henry Farrell.
The herald of which is, of course, Sheryl Crow.
"AI's Sheryl Crow Moment", Max Read for his newsletter Read Max
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