In the Mission, they keep condoms behind the counter. Five blocks north, where there are fewer Latinos, they’re out. http://curecvsnow.org
I see why I don’t remember any of _Crabgrass Frontier_: it’s terribly written. Luckily, a new edition comes out this Friday.
Reading _Seeing Like a State_. Great book — p. 329 alone is a much better version of _Blink_. Thanks to everyone who recommended it.
I keep getting annoyed that Jim Scott uses “utilitarian” to mean “instrumental”. Also, whoever keeps adding commas to library books: stop.
Do people on Wall Street refer to the _Wall Street Journal_ as “the local paper”?
Posted a brief description of Obama’s policy process: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/policyprimer
Finished _Outliers_. Definitely Gladwell’s best book. Finished _The Hearts of Men_. Brilliant rethinking from Playboy to Phyllis Schafly.
Yet it must be remembered that what appears to us an extensive, complicated, and yet well ordered institution is the outcome of so many doings and pursuits, carried on by savages, who have no laws or aims or charters definitely laid down. They have no knowledge of the total outline of any of their social structure. They know their own motives, know the purpose of individual actions and the rules which apply to them, but how, out of these, the whole collective institution shapes, this is beyond their mental range. Not even the most intelligent native has any clear idea of the Kula as a big, organized social construction, still less of its sociological function and implications. If you were to ask him what the Kula is, he would answer by giving a few details, most likely by giving his personal experiences and subjective views on the Kula, but nothing approaching the definition just given. Not even a partial coherent account could be obtained. For the integral picture does not exist in his mind; he is in it, and cannot see the whole from the outside.—Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians — and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe…—H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fourth Series, 1924
—House of Cards, 1x01Alright, Stoat, take yourself off. And try not to be such a damn fool — if you must use whores, for God’s sake go to a decent knocking-shop where they understand the meaning of discretion.
Stamper will give you a list if you don’t know any yourself.