He had no time for town council pragmatism, but instead entered with a progressivist, imperial swagger, and a tincture of injured colonial pride.
Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, Peter Galison
Some people think that science communication is about simple explanation of complex abstract concepts. I think it's about using phrases like "tincture of injured colonial pride." Another banger from this book:
Twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard—neither plumber nor physicist could cherish such a hodgepodge.
Fun fact: A very small aside in this book led me to pitch and sell one of my first published essays ever. I was paid $250 for it and I think it mostly holds up but I'm not sure because of The Atlantic's obscenely aggressive paywall. I "met" Peter Galison via a Zoom once and I can't remember if I told him this fun fact but I hope someone has told him and I hope he didn't hate it.
The work of maintenance is ultimately a way of parsing and knowing a thing and deciding, over and over, what it’s worth.
"The Disappearing Art of Maintenace, Alex Vuocolo for Noema
Submitted by Keith.
I envied the odious children and the frictionless way they moved through the world, they gave the impression of being clean and without history, like gentiles, like people unstained by ancestral shame.
Study for Obedience, Sarah Bernstein
Via Sophie's Instagram Stories.
Tragedy shows what is perishable, what is fragile, and what is slow-moving about us.
Tragedy, The Greeks, and Us, Simon Critchley
I encountered this sentence during a performance of Prometheus Firebringer by Annie Dorsen at Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn.
Annie lives in my neighborhood and I first met her at the dog park; she has a wonderful little dog named Gino who has brilliant golden eyes and will delightedly jump into your lap to give you kisses if you are sitting on one of the dog park benches. Approximately a year into knowing Annie from this context, I found out she was a 2019 recipient of a Macarthur Genius grant. I actually had seen one of her shows at BAM a long, long time ago! Anyway: you can go read reviews of Prometheus Firebringer to get a less-biased take, maybe, but I loved it and I love that Annie is such a down-to-earth, incisive, funny thinker on stage and at the dog park. (You can also read the full text of the show's citation-based-collage-y monologue here.)
The question “Has the Sexual Revolution Failed” contains within itself a number of other questions (failed at what? Failed whom? Why are we talking about this?), precisely none of which were answered Wednesday night at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where 1,600 plaid-skirted e-girls and be-khakied normies and the aspiring canceled paid as much as $165 a seat to hear a British ideologue, a deft Dimes Square shape-shifter, an ex-Muslim podcaster, and Techno Mechanicus’s mother debate the resolution.
"Scenes from the End of the Sexual Revolution", Kerry Howley for New York Magazine
Mixed feelings about whether this event merited documenting at all, but winningly acerbic at least. Strong follow-up contender: