67 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2025
    1. In my experience, every kind of writing requires some kind of self-soothing Jedi mind trick, and, when it comes to essay composition, the rectangle is mine. By Zadie Smith

      to_read

    1. To celebrate its centenary, The New Yorker invited fiction writers to contribute stories inspired by works from the archive, then to explain why those works inspired them. Sign up to receive the latest Takes directly in your inbox.

      to_read

    1. Henry W. Fowler believed he knew how sentences should read—and his judgments have shaped The New Yorker’s style for a century.

      Henry W. Fowler believed he knew how sentences should read—and his judgments have shaped The New Yorker’s style for a century.

      to_read

    1. Shadow Ticket,” Pynchon’s first book in a dozen years, unfolds its conspiracies in Depression-era Milwaukee and beyond, but it lands in a moment when reality seems to have caught up with his fictions.

      reading_list

  2. Jul 2023
    1. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.

      A rational derangement of the senses sounds awfully close to "prolonged romantic disorientation."

    1. Gesamtkunstwerk

      A Gesamtkunstwerk is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so. The term is a German loanword accepted in English as a term in aesthetics.

    2. let that hundredth flower bloom

      The name of the movement originated in a poem:

      Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend. (Bàihua qifàng, baijia zhēngming)

      Mao had used this to signal what he had wanted from the intellectuals of the country, for different and competing ideologies to voice their opinions about the issues of the day. He alluded to the Warring States

    1. apposite

      apposite 'apazit | adjective apt in the circumstances or in relation to something: an apposite quotation | the observations are apposite to the discussion.

    1. attack on Jenin

      July 3, 2023: Israel’s military has launched air raids on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank, carrying out an ongoing large-scale attack that involved a missile and the killing of at least eight Palestinians.

    1. Who needs the novel? If we believe Joseph Epstein’s theory of the novel, then Joseph Epstein does.

      This is a biting review of the book, delineating the amateurness of the attempt and the hypocrisy of the author.

    1. We often seem to be listening to yet another batch of Nixon tapes or, perhaps, tapes of another Nixon so different from the Watergate tapes that he seems to have undergone a character transformation. It is gossipy, outrageous, comical, fascinating, entertaining, delightful stuff.

      Referring to Nixon in Winter

    1. The underlying causes of the symptoms of M.S. began to be gleaned with the work of the nineteenth-century French physician Jean-Martin Charcot, who is today considered a founder of modern neurology

      Reading up on Charcot may be interesting

    1. If there is a tangible effect on our politics resulting from artworks and entertainment products such as Miranda’s, it is in their degrading of the political discourse. Politics are more infantilized, tribal, performative, and symbolic because of such works. Their overall political effect is in all directions negative.

      No punches are pulled.

    2. No doubt emptier statements than this have been printed in The Atlantic, but its meaninglessness in the context of contemporary American life is worth observing. It is a farce to imagine that artworks about the plight of immigrants in any way help attend to the material problems of how the nation’s immigration and asylum systems are to be run.

      Not a fan of Miranda's article! Forget what I said about To Read!

    3. Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, “We love the status quo.” We’ve just dirtied the word “politics,” made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something. ... My point is that it has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world.

      Toni Morrison, 2008

    4. Rarely are the politics of an artwork, even when it addresses political matters directly, any more penetrating than the statement of a problem. Rarely does art treat political subjects with the complexity found even in quality journalism. Expecting artists to contend with social scientific data, to carry out the work of think tanks or propose legislation, would be silly. Instead, what political art does proffer is the experience of recognition. For many, finding in art an expression of their political concerns asserted in a voice not their own can be terribly affecting, because it is validating.

      Good summary of the points in this article.