Teddy Roosevelt - the 'best' President

Theodore Roosevelt is still one of the most face-smashing, rough-riding, badass dudes to grace the Oval Office with his awesomeness. Here's a bulletized, easily-digestible list of all the insane shit you probably didn't know about the 26th President.

He grew up an asthmatic, in a time when asthma was a debilitating affliction. He was sickly and weak...then he grew up to become a professional boxer and all-around iron-pumping, hard-as-nails tough guy . He spoke French and German fluently, studied in Europe, wrote numerous literary works and got his degree on scholarship from Harvard University.

When he asked his girlfriend Alice Hathaway Lee to marry him, she said no. This didn't deter him and made him go out of his way to be even more kickass. The second time he asked her she agreed, because everybody knows that a badass like TR always gets the girl in the end. For their honeymoon, they went mountain climbing because they were even more Xtreme than Tony Hawk is when he's drunk at 3AM and decides he's going to try and ollie over a fifteen foot-tall statue of Jesus.

TR knew how to pose for awesome pictures:




He was the youngest person to ever become a state representative for New York when he was elected at age 23.

When his wife and mother died on the same day (Valentine's Day 1884), Teddy ditched everything and moved out West (Clint Eastwood-style) to try and kick ass like a cowboy.

While he was out West, some douchebag named Mike Finnegan and his gang stole TR's boat. Instead of crying like a girl about it, Roosevelt pursued them for two weeks through the Dakota Badlands, kicked their asses, handed them over to the authorities and got his boat back.

He returned to New York and was made commissioner of the NYPD. Instead of being a pussy and hiding in his office all day like the commish on Batman, TR went undercover as a beat cop and walked the streets of New York trying to catch policemen slacking off or taking bribes. If he busted them in the act, he fired them, punched them in the mouth and then stuffed them into a garbage can.

President McKinley made Roosevelt the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. When the Spanish sunk the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba while his boss was on vacation, TR sent Admiral Dewey to the Philippines to take out the Spanish Navy. Roosevelt then declared a state of War with Spain, despite the fact the he had absolutely no authority to do so. Acting on Roosevelt's orders, Dewey then sunk the entire Spanish fleet at Manila in about four hours.

Immediately after issuing the declaration of War and giving the Spanish Armada a one-way all-expenses-paid trip to the bottom of the fucking ocean, Roosevelt resigned his post as Assistant Secretary and formed his own volunteer cavalry regiment called the "Rough Riders". He took anybody who wanted to join, regardless of race or creed, and headed out to Cuba to whomp asses. At the Battle of San Juan Hill, the decisive battle that sealed the American victory in Cuba, Roosevelt won the Congressional Medal of Honor for "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity" and was promoted to Colonel.




When he returned as a war hero, Roosevelt decided to run for Governor of New York. Since the New Yorkers knew that TR was going to clean out all the corruption in town, George Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman decided to instead nominate him as a candidate for Vice President, a post where he presumably wouldn't have any power to do anything. The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket won, and McKinley was assassinated almost immediately. TR became President on 9/14/1901.

Out on a hunting trip in 1901, while Vice President of the United States, Roosevelt killed a cougar. But not in a generic, "normal" way of killing a mountain lion. No, Teddy made sure to kill the cougar by killing it with only a knife. Suck on that Cheney!

As President, Roosevelt settled strikes, broke up powerful trusts, built the Panama Canal, desegregated Japanese schoolchildren in California, fought to preserve the independence of South American countries from Europe and worked to conserve the American outdoors by commissioning numerous state parks. He also invited Booker T. Washington to chill at the White House, marking the first time a black man had ever eaten dinner as an official guest at the White House.

TR won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end to the Russo-Japanese War. How many people in history can claim that they won both the Nobel Peace Prize for making peaceful and harmonious shit happen as well as the Congressional Medal of Honor for kicking asses and possibly even taking names?

Just to prove how awesome he was TR built a huge fleet of white battleships and sailed it around the world, making sure to stop at the ports of any nation that thought it could possibly kick the US's ass just to prove to them that they couldn't.

He was also the first President to:

- ride in an airplane

- own an automobile

- dive in a submarine

- have a telephone in his home

- ride in an automobile

- travel outside the U.S. while in office

- receive the first electoral vote cast by a woman delegate (Helen B. Scott in 1912)

- advocate a Jewish homeland in Palestine (1917)

- advocate the establishment of a League of Nations (1915)

- host the Olympics (St. Louis, Missouri, 1904)
While campaigning in 1912, Roosevelt stopped in Milwaukee to spread his word. Getting ready to give a speech, a man named John Schrank approached Teddy and shot him in the chest. He was quickly apprehended. But what's a flesh wound to Theodore Roosevelt? Minutes later, T.R. went on stage, announced he had been shot, and GAVE THE SPEECH, which was 3,800+ words. After the speech was finished he went to hospital to have the bullet removed.

TR went on an African Safari in 1909 and put an expedition together to explore the Amazon in 1913. While in the Amazon rain forest he battled disease, heat and hostile tribesmen before discovering a new river, the Rio Teodoro, and returning home in 1914.

After his death, a notable politician remarked, "Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake there would have been a fight".

Basically, TR was awesome. He succeeded at everything he attempted, could fight and ride with the best of them, and was essentially one of (if not the) most badass political figures in American history. If you're interested in learning more about the magical time when American Presidents were American Badasses, this page has a great biography of Roosevelt.

Anselm of Canterbury - the ontological argument

Let's work through the argument as Anselm presents it.

Anselm writes:

... we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.

This is Anselm's definition. We might paraphrase it as follows:

By "God" we mean an absolutely unsurpassable being, a being that cannot conceivably be improved upon.

As we've stressed, you do not need to agree that this is what the word "God" ordinarily means. Treat it as a stipulation. Clearly, if Anselm can establish the existence of a being of this sort, his conclusion would be of immense philosophical and theological significance.

Or is there no such nature, since the Fool has said in his heart, there is no God?

This puts the question: Is there in fact a being with the properties our definition assigns to God?

But, at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which I speak - a being than which nothing greater can be conceived - understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he does not understand it to exist.

This begins and ends straightforwardly. The fool understands the definition of God but denies that God exists. The first hint of strangeness comes in what seems to be a parenthetical remark: "what he understands is in his understanding". Anselm apparently proposes to treat the understanding or the mind as if it were a place, and to speak of things existing "in the understanding". Anselm's assumption here is that if I understand claims about God, then we may say that God exists in my understanding or in my mind.

For it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, another to understand that the object exists. For when a painter first conceives of what he will afterwards perform, he has it in his understanding be he does not yet understand it to be, because he has not yet performed it. But after he has made the painting, he both has it in his understanding and he understands that it exists, because he has made it.

Anselm here explains a distinction. It is one thing for an object to exist in my understanding, and another for me to understand it to exist. This is a familiar distinction, even if the terms are not familiar. Ghosts, trolls, flying saucers and the like are all things I can think about. We might say that I have ideas of these things; Anselm says that they exist in the understanding. Anselm's point is that in general there is a difference between saying that something exists in my understanding and saying that I understand (or believe) it to exist. Trolls exist in my understanding; but I do not understand them to exist.

Hence even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding.

Here Anselm applies the distinction he has just drawn to the case of God. The fool understands claims about God. So God - a being than which none greater can be conceived - exists in his understanding. Anselm means this to be an entirely uncontroversial claim.

And assuredly, that than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot exist in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality, which is greater.

Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible.

This is the heart of the argument. The trick is to show that God cannot possibly exist in the understanding alone. Anselm begins by contrastingexisting in the understanding with existing in reality. This by itself is not problematic. Trolls exist in the understanding alone; Bill Clinton exists both in the understanding and in reality; and no doubt there are things that exist in reality that do not yet exist in the understanding because no human being has ever managed to frame a thought about them. The picture seems to be as follows:


In the area marked A we have things that exist in the understanding alone; in the area marked B we have things that exist both in the understanding and in reality; and in the area marked C we have things that exist in reality but not in the understanding. (For obvious reasons, we cannot give any concrete examples of the last category.)

At this stage the fool has conceded that God exists in the understanding: so God belongs either in A or in B. Anselm now argues that God cannot exist in the understanding alone. The argument seems to proceed as follows.

(1) Suppose (with the fool) that God exists in the understanding alone.

(2) Given our definition, this means that a being than which none greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone.

(3) But this being can be conceived to exist in reality. That is, we can conceive of a circumstance in which theism is true, even if we do not believe that it actually obtains.

(4) But it is greater for a thing to exist in reality than for it to exist in the understanding alone.

(5) Hence we seem forced to conclude that a being than which none greater can be conceived can be conceived to be greater than it is.

(6) But that is absurd.

(7) So (1) must be false. God must exist in reality as well as in the understanding.

This reading of the argument is amply confirmed by the final paragraph:

Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence there is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality. 

A Reconstruction of the Argument

This is a useful first pass at the argument. Now let's go over it and try to isolate its most fundamental assumptions. (I'll highlight the premises of the reconstructed argument in red.) Remember the argument's dialectical context. The aim is to refute the fool - or less tendentiously, the rational atheist. So what we want to know about these premises is whether the fool should accept them. There is first the definition:

(a) By "God" we mean "a being than which no greater being can be conceived"

Then there are some assumptions about the Fool's understanding.

(b) We understand what it means to speak of a being than which no greater can be conceived. We understand what these words mean.

(c) We can conceive of such a being's existing in reality.

Anselm now assumes a principle that he clearly regards as trivial.

(d) If we understand what it means to speak of X, then X exists in the understanding.

From (a),(b) and (d) we may now infer:
(e) God exists in the understanding.

(Note: this is not a premise. It is an intermediate conclusion supported by a quick argument from premises we have already accepted.)

Anselm now employs a form of reasoning called reductio ad absurdum. This is a very useful technique. In a proof of this sort, we begin by assuming the opposite of what we want to prove. Then we derive a contradiction or an absurdity from this supposition. And from this we conclude that our original assumption was false. The general form of such an argument is as follows:

Suppose P

From P it follows that Q

But Q is absurd (self-contradictory).

Therefore P is false.

For Anselm the target of his reduction is the proposition that God exists in the understanding alone. So let us suppose that this is the case:

(f) Suppose that God exists in the understanding but not in reality.

From (f) and (c) we may now infer

(g) God in fact exists in the understanding alone, but he may be conceived to exist in reality as well as in the understanding.

At this point Anselm wields what is perhaps his most controversial premise. It is hard to know exactly how to formulate it. But something like the following seems to be what Anselm has in mind.

(h) If something exists in the understanding alone, but can be conceived to exist in reality, then that thing can be conceived to be greater than it actually is.

The idea seems to be: if we compare two things that are alike in all respects except that one exists in the understanding alone and the other exists in reality, then the one that exists in reality is clearly greater, better, more perfect. We will have to discuss the cogency of this assumption in class. But suppose for now that it is granted. We may then argue as follows. From (g) and (h) it follows that

(I) God can be conceived to be greater than it actually is.

But this is absurd. For given our definition (a), this just means that

(j) A being that cannot be conceived to be greater than it is can be conceived to be greater than it is.

From which it follows that our supposition (f) is false. We may therefore conclude

(k) God exists in reality.

Now you should ask: Is this a valid argument as it stands? Are the assumptions plausible? Would the fool be willing to grant them? Would you be willing to grant them? If you think that the argument is not a good one, you are under an obligation to say where it goes wrong. It might go wrong in several places. See how many "mistakes" you can find.

Don't stop

Everything that happens will happen today

BRIAN AND DAVID: HOW & WHY

This record was born as a dinner conversation. While dining in New York with David and some other friends, I mentioned that I had accumulated a lot of music, which, despite my intentions, I had never formed into songs. David volunteered to give them a try. By and large, we stuck to our separate territories: I worked on the instrumentals, and he generally focused on the lyrics and vocals. This arrangement seemed to work well.

Upon starting this project, we quickly realized we were making something like electronic gospel, music in which singing becomes the central event, but whose sonic landscapes are atypical of such vocal-centered tracks. This notion tapped into my long love affair with gospel music, which, curiously, was inadvertently initiated by David and the Talking Heads.

“Surrender to His Will,” by Reverend Maceo Woods and The Christian Tabernacle Choir, was the first gospel song I ever really responded to. I heard it on a distant South American radio station whilst in Compass Point, Nassau, working with Talking Heads on the album More Songs about Buildings and Food. Spending time with them, and becoming aware of their musical interests, opened my ears to genres and styles I hadn't really noticed up to that point, including gospel. So, it's fitting that the circle should close with this record.

As a foreigner in New York — where I ended up shortly after recording More Songs — I was surprised by how little attention Americans gave to their own great indigenous music. It was even slightly uncool, as though the endorsement of gospel necessarily implied support of its associated religious framework. Thanks to Reverend Woods however, I began to see gospel music as conveying the act of surrender more than the act of worship; and this, of course, intrigued me, and has informed my music ever since. Perhaps it's the reason I use modes and chords that are easy to follow and harmonize with. I want music to be inviting, to offer the listener a place inside it. I think David responded to this with sensitivity and skill, and his natural edginess made those familiar progressions sound new to me once again.

— Brian Eno
London




A couple of years ago, I passed through London and, having reconnected with Brian Eno during the Bush of Ghosts re-release, I popped round his office/studio to hear what he'd been working on. Just before parting, I recall Brian mentioning that he had accumulated a large number of instrumental tracks. Since Brian, in his own words, “hates writing words,” I suggested having a go at some lyrics and melodies for a few tracks, and we'd take it from there. If Brian wasn't pleased with the initial results, then, well that would be that.

Back in New York, Brian sent me a CD with some instrumentals — stereo rough mixes to be precise — and I listened to them on and off, trying to get a sense for the story the music was trying to tell. The tracks weren't ambient, as one might expect, and I sensed a song structure might emerge from these very evocative seeds. Emergence is a popular term these days, but it does almost perfectly evoke how musicians and songwriters cultivate the latent undertones of a basic musical kernel into something only hinted at in the song's humble beginnings. And thus, writers and musicians are often quoted as saying they feel only partially responsible for the creation of the works they've grown and nurtured.

After living with some of his music for almost a year, I eventually wrote back to Brian. I told him the tracks inspired a sort of folk-electronic-gospel feeling, and suggested that my words and tunes might reflect this, and did that direction seem OK?

I attacked the first song, which I think Brian had called “And Suddenly.” I'd just finished reading Dave Eggers's book What is the What?, about a young man named Valentino and his hallucinatory and horrific journey from his destroyed village in Darfur to Atlanta, Georgia and beyond. Valentino's story was harrowing but also beautiful, uplifting (in a un-corny way), and at times even funny. I think I may have been under the spell of his story when I sat down in front of my microphone.

The result is “One Fine Day.” I sang a few harmonies in the choruses to make it sound fuller and better and sent it off to Brian.

We were both thrilled: the gospel-folk-electronic seed had sprung to life, fully articulated here in this song. The words had some Biblical allusions, but nothing too overt. We agreed to continue, for the time being at least.

In the coming months, I produced an event about bicycles for The New Yorker Festival at Town Hall, to which I invited the Young at Heart Chorus to sing Queen's “Bicycle Race.” For our encore we did “One Fine Day,” which has an added resonance when performed by a choir with an average age of 80 years.

I wrote and recorded some more, completing “My Big Nurse” and “Life Is Long” next. It soon became apparent that we were not only happy with the results, but had found our path and would continue to follow it. We agreed on a fairly clear division of labor: music, Brian, vocals and lyrics, me.



The foundations of some of the tracks are much like those of traditional folk, country, or gospel songs before these styles became harmonically sophisticated. Brian's chord structures were unlike anything I would have chosen myself, so I was pushed in a new direction, asked to face the unfamiliar, and this, of course, was a good thing. The challenge was more emotional than technical: to write simple, heartfelt tunes without drawing on cliché. The results, in many cases, are uplifting, hopeful, and positive, even though some lyrics describe cars exploding, war, and similarly dark scenarios.

These songs have elements of our previous work — no surprise there — but something new has emerged here as well. Where does the sanguine and heartening tone come from, particularly in these troubled times? As I hinted at above, some of my lyrics and melodies were a response to what I sensed lay buried in the music. My task was to bring forth into language what was originally non-verbal. In the end, we have made something together that neither of us could have made on our own.

— DB
Hell's Kitchen, NYTOP

Tiberius

A few days after Tiberius reached Capreae and was by himself, a fisherman appeared unexpectedly and offered him a huge mullet; whereupon in his alarm that the man had clambered up to him from the back of the island over rough and pathless rocks, he had the poor fellow's face scrubbed with the fish. In the midst of his torture the man cried out "thank the stars I did not bring Caesar the large crab I had caught". Tiberius sent for the crab and had his face scrubbed with it in the same way.

Gang und Nam - le deux

Subversive K Pop

Red vs Black

Oedipus and the Sphinx

The Suicide of Ajax

Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds

Odysseus and the Sirens

Ajax and Odysseus play battleship

Gang und nam

A Shadow over Marlinspike

Mathnet

What you are about to see is a fib, but it's short.

The names are made up, but the problems are real.

Bomber

The Royal Hunt

People taking photos with iPads

no

say yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

The School

by Barthelme

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that ... that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems ... and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes – well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that ... you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.

With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably ... you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe ... well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander ... well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.

Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.

We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.

We weren’t even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to the school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then... And that’s what it did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap yap yapping. They named it Edgar – that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely, because I knew what was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian.

And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program, all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing, the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn’t have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think, nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the school, particularly, I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year, it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.

The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that, the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.

I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s father who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of –
I said, yes, maybe.
They said, we don’t like it.
I said, that’s sound.
They said, it’s a bloody shame!
I said, it is.
They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.
I do like Helen but I said that I would not.
We’ve heard so much about it, they said, but we’ve never seen it.
I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out the window.
They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door, I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.

Beijing Forever

Beijing, as most Chinese know it, was a neglected relic after the Japanese occupation of World War II and the Chinese Civil War. In 1949, when the victorious communists moved the capital back there from Nanjing, it was a bankrupt town of 1.4 million people; almost nothing of any consequence was made or manufactured there. But the path to the shining communist future lay through industry, at least according to the Soviets, who had already put a quarter of Muscovites to work in new factories, and from the rostrum in Tiananmen Square, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong called for an "ocean of smokestacks" to rise over Beijing's traditional skyline of one-story courtyards.

And rise they did. From 1955, when Soviet advisors arrived to reshape the capital into an industrial base, to the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping's market reforms took hold, Beijing was home to 149 of China's 164 types of industry. Fourteen thousand smokestacks punctuated the skyline, proclaiming the city as the country's largest petrochemical base; the leading producer of rubber products, plastic, and refrigerators; second in pig iron and washing machines; third in power generators, wool cloth, cars, and color televisions; fourth in internal combustion engines; and fifth in sewing machines and beer.

Deng authorized the creation of a private housing market in 1980, and as China's economy shifted from planned to market, so did Beijing's. Among all Chinese cities, finance accounts for the highest percentage of GDP here (13.8 percent in 2010), as the service (and, increasingly, high-tech) sector now makes up nearly three-quarters of Beijing's revenue. It trails only Tokyo in the number of Fortune Global 500 companies that call it home.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/13/beijing_forever?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

One does not dissect gossamer

Tuesday's Solution

Best Bob Hughes burn

The New Republic, 1987:


The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such as they are, remind one that the converse is also true. The unlived life is not worth examining

Mars

Breaking Bad

Watching a whole season over one weekend is not recommended.

Beijing Traffic Lesson: Left Turn

From 'So I'm Going to China'

As I may have mentioned before, traffic in Beijing is its own art form. The city is adding thousands of cars per - I don't even know, week? Which means you have a healthy mix of people who have never driven before interspersed with people who should never have been driving in the first place.

To introduce you to the intricacies of Beijing driving, I will start with a relatively simple concept: the left turn.

STEP 1:

We see here a typical intersection. The light has just turned green for the east-west streets, and car [A], an enormous black Lexus with pitch black windows, wants to make a left turn into the southbound lanes. Pedestrians wait on each corner. (For purposes of this demonstration, we'll assume no one is running the north-south red light, and no one is jaywalking - a rather large assumption.)

Time

The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sun dial.
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions

Plautus c.200BC

Ravel - Concerto for the left hand and Orchestra

Mondrian