Bratislava Expat Bookstore Survives
Next Apache deep blog samizdatish bookstore has survived 13 years selling English-language books in Bratislava.
February 06, 2018
By TAYLOR NOEL
Meredith in a hurry to take down Time Inc. signage Page Six
Sphere is publishing The World’s Fittest Book by endurance athlete and adventurer Ross Edgley, who most recently swam 60k between two islands while towing a 45kg log.
I have a tremendous fear of dying, like most people I assume. I don’t like to swim in the ocean because I feel that somewhere in that vast blue depth is a shark waiting to attack me. I can’t drive a car without thinking about the potential for a fatal accident. I’m just not super into the idea of death.
What the hell is going on at Newsweek? The OutlineRobert Parry: When ‘Independent’ Journalism Meant Something The American Conservative
The Pentagon’s ‘Logistics Agency’ Lost Track of More Than $800 Million New York Magazine
Who’s worse, Trump or Nixon? LA Times
ADVERTISING: “While watching TV advertising, I often get the feeling I’m being lectured to. The Super Bowl [this past Sunday] was a series of lectures with this message: ‘As often as we’ve tried to educate you people out there in flyover country, you remain resistant to our efforts to civilize you. We continue to detect traces of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia in your makeup; and so it’s our moral imperative to disabuse you of those ideas.’…These lectures are so important to the woke folk on Madison Avenue that the corporations—and the ad agencies that do their bidding—spend untold millions of dollars in which the products themselves never make an appearance. There was nary a phone in the T-Mobile ad, and no macaroni showed up in the Kraft ad.”
ADVERTISING: “While watching TV advertising, I often get the feeling I’m being lectured to. The Super Bowl [this past Sunday] was a series of lectures with this message: ‘As often as we’ve tried to educate you people out there in flyover country, you remain resistant to our efforts to civilize you. We continue to detect traces of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia in your makeup; and so it’s our moral imperative to disabuse you of those ideas.’…These lectures are so important to the woke folk on Madison Avenue that the corporations—and the ad agencies that do their bidding—spend untold millions of dollars in which the products themselves never make an appearance. There was nary a phone in the T-Mobile ad, and no macaroni showed up in the Kraft ad.”
It’s likely no coincidence the T-Mobile ad pounded home one of Obama’s favorite word in 2008, with the slogan “Change Starts Now,” and Hyundai’s maudlin cancer-themed ad included his other favorite solipsism in its title, “Hope Detector.” And then there was Dodge’s remarkably unseemly tone-deaf notion to sell four-wheel drive pickups with a Martin Luther King speech.
Last year, pre-Weinstein, when Meryl Streep used her lifetime achievement award speech at the Golden Globes as an anti-Trump manifesto, Rod Dreher wrote:
It looks as if we are becoming a culture where if you aren’t 100 percent in favor of something, then you are ipso facto the enemy. It reminds me of Milan Kundera’s writing about “kitsch” in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”… In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.
Exposing the oikophobic worldview that lies behind our not so elite “elite.”