Alas, how miserable their good looks made him! The pain of watching beautiful young girls, the isolation of desire! They reminded him of the figures in one of those pictures by Watteau that are instinct with the beauty of the moment, the fugitive distress of hedonism, the sadness that falls like dew from pleasure, as they stand, fixed in the movement of the dance, beneath the elms, beneath the garlanded urn.
-Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool
Taylor, the founding editor of Fast Company, and LaBarre, formerly a senior editor for Fast Company, discussed how small businesses can make their mark by out-thinking large business competitors and by not playing it safe. Most big organizations exist to play it safe, and that is not playing it smart Playing by a Different Set of Rules: Independent Booksellers as Mavericks
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: The in-betweeners
The Greatest Generation fought and died for narcissist Baby Boomers with their “lifestyles.” Between them were the people who made a revolution
The injustice of it all. "I've seen the Stones many times," complained Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith, a few years ago. "I don't feel they play as good as we do. You've got one hard-working guy out there and the rest of them are kind of doing their thing."
• They’re too old to be boomers [At what point does a regime, even if democratically elected, become illegitimate, as surely Hitler's was by the time T. S. Eliot wrote? Brave New World ; The story of Catholicism in America may be an open book, but the book reads very differently depending on who's doing the writing Subculture called vital for a Catholic resurgence ]
• · Hiring a federal employee might seem like a sure bet with the recommendation of a former boss. Bosses often tout bad apples as terrific employees just to get rid of them; And strange as it may seem, the idea that sex is a "private" act is only a couple of centuries old History of Single Life: Fun in numbers; Why are people world-wide seduced by McDonald’s, Hollywood shlock, SUVs? The very fact makes some of the seduced hate America all the more. Jozef Joffe explains Dissecting Anti-isms
• · · The National Review gets nearly everything wrong in their list of the 50 greatest conservative rock songs. They Got Fooled ; Life's a Party for New York Nightlife's Sober Hipsters: It's somewhere between 2 and 4 a.m. and everyone is wasted. It could be any night, any club, anywhere. But tonight, it's a freakishly cold March evening during the Winter Music Conference in Miami, at a club called the Pawn Shop. Beyond the main dancefloor, where hundreds of revelers groove, in the darkened corners of the gargantuan club, you can see people doing drugs. Iceberg: The Sober Bunch ; Despite the attack on the twin towers, plenty of skyscrapers are rising. They are taller and more daring than ever, but still mostly monuments to magnificence. Better than flying
• · · · It's easy to laugh off the fashion for PoMo, but harder to find a constructive solution. Australia’s wackiest postmodernists; ; PoMo's unteachable The gaps of suspicion in the wall ; and what is the difference between King Lear and Ginger Meggs? The real victims of PoMo are students who have never been introduced to the classics of Czech literature Cold River
• · · · · At what point does a regime, even if democratically elected, become illegitimate, as surely Hitler's was by the time T. S. Eliot wrote? New twist in 'hobbit' human story ; How Tom Wolfe became dull. Big, Bad Wolfe ; There is no shortage of inventive sadism in the pages of Candy Licker
• · · · · · There's a huge demand for metrics on the success or failure of popular-culture products: - Daniel Gross on why writers never reveal how many books their buddies have sold Book Clubbed ; A review of The "Vanity of the Philosopher": From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics That People are the Same and Different