“Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.”
—Roger Ailes in a Gawker exclusive: Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News (via soupsoup)
June 2011
19 posts
“Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.”
—Nabokov, Pnin.
“We have argued elsewhere (and are not unique in doing so) that white backlash—especially Southern white backlash—against the civil rights movement transformed American politics, creating the opportunity for a major push to undermine the New Deal. Also, it’s hard to make sense of the growing ability of bankers to get the rules rewritten in their favor without talking about the role of money in politics, and how that role has metastasized over the past thirty years. There’s another book to be written here—perhaps less personality-centered and hence less entertaining than Madrick’s, but one that gets at the forces that made the reign of financial villains possible. Whatever the deeper story, however, Madrick’s subtitle gets it right: what we have experienced is, in a very real sense, the triumph of Wall Street and the decline of America.”
—The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why?
i think i just fucked up
jesus yall
the new why we fight fucking nails it
“The assumption is that everyone else is going to absurd lengths to seem a certain way, whereas you and the people you understand are just being yourselves. There’s surely no better example of this habit than the word “hipster,” a pejorative people lob at anyone who’s even slightly more interested in current trends than they are. That person must be doing it on purpose, to seem cool and superior, right? Which is possibly how you look to someone slightly less interested in current trends than you are— but you’re normal, and not trying too hard at all.”
—why we fight 15
