Recent content on ∅
David Brooks: 
 
 If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. To borrow from Thucydides, the strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. And if there is a consistent strategy, it is this: Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive. 
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 A menu describes what a restaurant serves—but a menu also describes who is being served. 



	
	
	
	
	
	

	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
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The Brinton Museum is built into a hillside outside Sheridan, Wyoming, and overlooks the Bighorn Mountains. The entrance feels like a portal to some interior place—or maybe an extension of that interior place as it tries to emerge from the earth. 
 Inside is a striking collection of indigenous and Western art, including: recollections and paintings of The Battle of the Greasy Grass / Little…

 Nahwa is a territory that forms part of the Emirate of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. It is a counter-enclave (or second-order enclave) within the Omani territory of Madha, which is itself an exclave of Oman and an enclave within the United Arab Emirates. 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 He starts the day as he means to continue, with a wee dram. 



	
	
	
	
	
	

	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
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 For the first time in my life, I had paper and ink. I was beside myself. I found a straight stick and shaved it to a point and scratched a groove on one side. I put the paper on my lap, dipped my stick into the ink and wrote the alphabet. I printed letters as I had seen them in books, slowly, clumsily. Then I wrote my first words. I wanted to be certain that they were mine and not some I had…


	
	
	
	
	
	

	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
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 “For my friend Fong,” he says, and begins singing John Denver. If you didn’t know it already, now you do: old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with their karaoke and when they do karaoke for some reason they love no one like they love John Denver. 
 Maybe it’s the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little…


	
	
	
	
	
	

	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
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The show was plenty enjoyable with memorable tunes, but for me it fell a bit short of the lavish praise it’s been receiving. While watching I found myself repeatedly thinking about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and missing that novel’s more interesting explorations of similar topics. The show also slows down through its second half and overexplains its ending.…


	
	
	
	
	
	

	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
		
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 It was the first font, and perhaps originally the only font that came with the engraver, so it suffered a nameless fate, familiar later to many bespoke bitmap fonts adorning the screens of early computers. 


 Our “present” does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us. 
 How far does this bubble extend? It depends on the precision with which we determine time. If by nanoseconds, the present is defined only over a few meters; if by milliseconds, it is defined over thousands of kilometers. As humans, we distinguish tenths of a second only with great…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 ‘Is there anything you would not give me?’ she had once asked. 
 ‘Nothing,’ he had said, instantly. ‘There is nothing.’ 
 For some reason, she had kept looking at him, and had waited. 
 ‘Well,’ he had said, clearing his throat. ‘Maybe the land. I wouldn’t want to give you the land.’ 


 Have you ever had a great day? The kind of day so great it imbues every single sad or boring or terrible day that came before it with deep meaning because from where you stand on this great day, all those days were secretly leading to this one? 

A good friend recommended this series and it did not disappoint. Raising a teeny ’tini to one of the most sincere and moving shows I’ve watched in a long time. 

Slung low, charmingly frantic, seaweed everywhere (in a good way). 


	
	
	
	
	
	

	
		
			
			
		
	
		
			
			
			

	

	 
		 
		
	 



“22 Hours in Balthazar,” New York Times : 
 
 Alvino is flying, his left hand’s fingers imperceptibly rotating the potato between upward strokes of the peeler, blindly flipping the naked spuds over his shoulder into the tub. I pull up my phone’s stopwatch to time him for a minute, treating each potato as a lap: his slowest is 10.7 seconds, his quickest 6.4. Alvino, a shy man…

 A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of…

 Q: Hola, quería saber el significado de esta frase que escuche en la película The Big Lebowsky : 
 Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you. 
 ¿Que quiere decir exactamente bar en ese contexto? Gracias por vuestro interés 
 A: Creo que quieres decir bear , no bar . Bear significa oso, y el dicho quiere decir que algunos días vences los obstáculos en la vida y otros…

 [P]rior to about the 1920s, no self-respecting Japanese person would eat any kind of tuna at all if they could possibly avoid it. Tuna was so despised in Japan that all tuna species qualified for an official term of disparagement: gezakana , or “inferior fish.” In the old days in Japan, if you had no choice but to eat tuna you’d do everything you could to get rid of the bloody metallic taste…
Kevin Moffett in The Believer : 
 
 Then, in my last year of college in Gainesville, Florida, I was given secondhand a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students. Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books “in no particular…