Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Emmanuel Macron reportedly said this to Joe Biden a couple of days ago: I had a call with MbZ [UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan]… He told me two things. I’m at a maximum, maximum (production capacity). This is…
I’ve argued that anti-abortionists have a common cause with Big Brother worshipers. The word “surveillance” has already appeared in some news headlines on states’ enforcement of their anti-abortion laws. But there’s another consequence: young professionals are now less likely to…
On abortion, my thoughts aren’t much different now than in 2016: …[E]nforcing a universal ban on abortion will require a greater degree of governmental interference into the private lives of the citizenry. It would make every woman of childbearing age…
In Tablet, David Mikics quotes Wallace Stevens and explains: His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light. […] Madame la Fleurie, the flowering earth,…
On February 12, 1942, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: If I were an Englishman I would tremble for the fate of the Empire. Taken out of context, it was a sensible call, although it didn’t take a genius to…
One of Hitler’s recurring tropes was the German empire’s and nation’s “remorseless struggle for existence.” Nazi officials beat that horse to death, and then some: There can be no compromise in Germany’s struggle for its existence, no turning back, no…
Tariq Aziz was Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister in 1983-91 and deputy prime minister in 1979-2003. In 1996, PBS interviewed Aziz for their Frontline series; the transcripts are available here and here. Speaking of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in August 1990,…
Here’s a video of the Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá – its youth section mostly – performing Janáček‘s Cunning Little Vixen in August 2021. The staging is as simple and low-budget as they go. I would call it home-made, but –…
The opening sentence of a recent piece by Laura Spinney in The Guardian: Isaac Newton apocryphally discovered his second law – the one about gravity – after an apple fell on his head. Newton’s second law of motion is F…
According to the Cambridge Dictionary of Spanish, brea means tar or pitch. Confusingly, the Spanish definition provided alongside the English translation is “sustancia resinosa de ciertas coníferas.” Roughly, “the resinous substance of certain coniferous plants,” which sounds more like resin…
I was trying to write a sensible comment to a piece on Medium, It’s Time We Tell the Truth about the Rolling Stones, when I came across a stunning essay by Margo Jefferson. Ripping Off Black Music, published in 1973…
There seems to be a pattern in this procession of clouds over the Baltic Sea. They resemble birds moving to a better place for the coming chilly season, a mixed flock of large and small birds in a not very…