Daniel

I'm posting this because it's my hope that someone, somewhere will stumble across this in furious googling and be saved the tiniest bit of frustration.

What do Americans want? Not to be like Finland is a safe guess. Americans have an egalitarian approach to inequality: they want everyone to have an equal chance to become better-off than everyone else.

But it is important to understand because, as the authors remark, “things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor”. They tell the story of meeting a Moroccan farmer, Oucha Mbarbk. They ask him what would he do if he had a bit more money. Buy some more food, came the reply. What would he do if he had even more money? Buy better, tastier food. “We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna and a DVD player.” Why had he bought all this if he didn't have enough money for food? “He laughed and said ‘Oh, but television is more important than food.'”

Given that intense media coverage of mass killings (a) plays straight into the perpetrators' tendency to want recognition for their crimes, and (b) encourages copycat iterations, can major media outlets police themselves not to play into these dynamics?

First, wishing Holmes away won’t do any good. It might well do harm. Arguably, the problem with deranged mass killers isn’t that they get too much publicity; it’s that they get too little.

The memory is less like a movie, a permanent emulsion of chemicals on celluloid, and more like a play—subtly different each time it’s performed. In my brain, a network of cells is constantly being reconsolidated, rewritten, remade. That two-letter prefix changes everything.

In many ways, Nick Roses is a typical 16-year-old. He lives with his parents, goes to school and meets up with his friends for pizza. But he’s also the Ft. Lauderdale area’s youngest talent manager. No matter where he is, he’s always wheeling and dealing, managing clients and barking into his ever-present cell phone. He makes deals from his parents’ dining room table And he does it all under the umbrella of his own company, RBS Management, with the help of his loyal colleague, Kim. But is everything coming up “Roses” for this underage overachiever? Find out in “Nick Roses: 10% Teen.”

Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens.

At some point late in my teens, in a spasm of post-adolescent resolve, I decided to renounce video games forever. They had, I recognized, a scary power over me — an opium kind of power — and I was hoping to cultivate other, more impressive ways of spending my time. I had aspirations of capital “c” culture, and so I started pouring my attention into books, a quieter and more socially respected form of escapism. I knew that, if I had daily access to video games, I would spend literally every day playing them, forever. So I cut myself off, more or less cold turkey, and as a result I was more or less happy and productive.

But none of this really matters. Procreation for the sake of the parents is ethically unacceptable. “To have a child in order to benefit oneself is a moral error,” Overall writes.

It's the dirty little secret of every middle-class person in their mid-thirties: Everybody's parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down payment on a first home? And if you don't have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for the kids or family vacations, God help you. America is becoming what it was founded to reject, what it has resisted throughout its history, a patronage society.

First, kids experience them as mythologies more than as stories—the narrative sweep is, curiously, the least significant part of their appeal. When kids talk about movies, it’s usually the cool parts that get highlighted. (“So there’s this, like, cool part where the guy—the blue guy?—has to tame, like, a flying dinosaur and they’re all on a cliff and he says, like, ‘How do I know which one is mine?’ And, so, the blue girl is, like, ‘He will try to kill you!’ ”) Readers of the Eragon books don’t relate cool incidents; they relate awesome elements. You hear about the Elders, the dragon riders, the magical fire-sword Brisingr; what drags readers in is not the story but the symbols and their slow unfolding. The sheer invocation of a mythology casts a deeper spell than putting the mythology on its feet and making it dance. If you talk to an Eragon reader, you will see why the introductory seven-page synopsis of the mythology is necessary. The synopsis is the story.

No Robots.

ᔥ stands for "via" and signifies a direct link of discovery, to be used when you simply repost a piece of content you found elsewhere, with little or no modification or addition.

Another way this thing will make me happy is that it comes with a durable carrying case.

Pagels may also underestimate the audience appeal of pure action: it’s possible for a popular narrative to be susceptible to an allegorical reading and still be engaging mostly for its spectacle. Some patient academic of the future will, on seeing “Transformers 2,” doubtless find patterns of local topical meaning—portents of the Arab Spring in the fight over the pyramids, evidence of the debate over the future of the automobile industry, and a hundred other things. But people just like violent otherworldly stuff, and give it a lot of non-allegorical license to do its thing. The fact that a religious book has a code in it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also have an aura around it. Spiritual texts are the original transformers; they take mundane descriptions of what’s going on and make them twelve feet tall and cosmic and able to knock down pyramids.