Power doesn’t always corrupt, and you can see it in the case of, for example, Al Smith or Sam Rayburn. There, power cleanses. But what power always does is reveal, because when you’re climbing, you have to conceal from people what it is you’re really willing to do, what it is you want to do. But once you get enough power, once you’re there, where you wanted to be all along, then you can see what the protagonist wanted to do all along, because now he’s doing it.
Burning Question for World Giraffe Day: Can They Swim?
Can Giraffes Swim?
A few years ago a colleague and I did an exhaustive analysis and concluded that they might—but not very well:
In conclusion, it seems that giraffes can float: there’s no reason to assume that they might ‘sink like stones’, nor was there any indication from the model that it was particularly unstable and prone to capsizing. But the model’s posture in the water is low and hardly ideal, and looks downright uncomfortable.
Tied Up in Knots Over a Goring Ox
To start with, the rabbis notice a glaring logical contradiction in the biblical law. According to Exodus, an ox that kills a human being is to be stoned to death immediately; yet it is only after goring three times that the ox earns the designation “forewarned.” How, then, could any ox ever be forewarned, when it wouldn’t live long enough to kill three times?
The Mirror Effect
How the rise of mirrors in the fifteenth century shaped our idea of the individual.
the development of glass mirrors marks a crucial shift, for they allowed people to see themselves properly for the first time, with all their unique expressions and characteristics.
The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame
“Men like Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Washington,” Parkinson writes, “developed a myth about who was and was not a part of the Revolutionary movement; about who had an interest and who did not.” Other esteemed advocates of the Revolution, such as Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette, joined the effort. According to Parkinson, these men chose to prosecute the American war for independence in a way that put race at the heart of the matter. They used—actually helped foment—racial prejudice as the principal means of creating unity across the thirteen colonies in order to prepare Americans to do battle with Great Britain. The base sentiments they promoted for “political expediency” survived the fighting, and the “narrative” that dismissed blacks and Native peoples as alien to America—and conflated “white” and “citizen”—“lived at the heart of the republic it helped create for decades to come.”
Effective war stories were definitely required because despite the colonists’ complaints about tyranny and being reduced to—of all things—“slavery,” they were
- “the least taxed,
- most socially mobile,
- highest landowning,
- arguably most prosperous people in the western world.”
Writers usually know their faults far better than reviewers
Usually the writer knows far better than the reviewer what his faults are, and if he could get rid of them he would. Nabokov, for instance, used to be told that he was pedantic – a fact he knew, and still knows, very well.
Elizabeth Warren on Gary Cohn and Financial Reform
They have also generated outrage in some quarters. “The way I see this, there was a devastating financial crisis just over eight years ago,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said. “Goldman Sachs was at the heart of that crisis. The idea that the president is now going to turn over the country’s economic policy to a senior Goldman executive turns my stomach.”
Trump’s Economic Cabinet Is Mostly Bare. This Man Fills the Void.
During that sit-down, on Nov. 29, Mr. Cohn briefed Mr. Trump on what he regarded as the chief hurdle to expanding the economy, according to people who were briefed on the discussion: a stronger dollar, which would undermine efforts to create jobs.
Mr. Darcy, You’re No Colin Firth
Rather, the “real” Mr. Darcy would have been pale and pointy-chinned, and would have had a long nose on an oval, beardless face. His hair, strangely, would have been white. And he would have been slightly undernourished, with sloping shoulders — “more ballet dancer than beefcake,” according to one of the authors of a new study.
How to save capitalism from itself
Yet, while capitalism at last stands electorally victorious and philosophically without serious rival, its performance has become manifestly unsatisfactory. Its core credential of steadily rising general living standards has been badly tarnished: a majority now expect their children’s lives to be worse than their own. It is time for “The Future of Capitalism”. Unfortunately, nobody has yet successfully written that book. In its absence, I will try to weave something from the strands of recent contributions to the field.