“When she wakes in the morning, she likes to start writing right away, before she speaks, because whatever remnants sleep has left are the gift her brain has given her for the day. Her dream life is important to the balance of her mind: it’s the place where she experiences disorder.”
—“How Hilary Mantel Revitalized Historical Fiction” by Larissa MacFarquhar, published in The New Yorker“He became absorbed by the process of change. How should you word a petition or design a Web site or dramatize an outrage so as to entice the most people to become involved or donate money? How does Congress work? How do you get a bill passed?...He came to believe that the influence of money in American politics was so great a problem that possibly little else could be solved until it was...the irrationalities of power fascinated him, but he found the irrationalities of activists exasperating. Most activists, in his experience, would launch big campaigns about big issues and do things that they guessed were beneficial, like running television ads, or sending out direct mail, but they never did the work to figure out whether what they were doing was actually changing policy. He couldn't stand that there were so many bad, inefficient non-profits out there, eating up donor money. When a business was based on a bad idea, it failed, but non-profits never failed, they just kept raising cash from people who wanted to believe in them”
—on Aaron Swartz, “Requiem For A Dream” by Larissa MacFaruhar“Prose creates a strong illusion of presence—so strong that it is difficult to destroy it. It is hard to remember that you are reading and not hearing. The illusion is stronger when the prose is online, partly because you are aware that it might be altered or redacted at any moment—the writer may be online, too, as you read it—and partly because the Internet has been around for such a short time that we implicitly assume (as we do not with a book) that the writer of a blog post is alive.”
—Requiem for A Dream, Larissa MacFarquhar“When people describe time's passage, they often say we are moving into the future, or that future events are getting closer, or that nowness, or the quality of being Now, is moving down the series of events like a spotlight moving along a line of chorus girls. But these claims, thought they can seem deeply true, make no sense.”
—Parfit, quoted by MacFarquhar, New Yorker, 5 September 2011, page 53.
“What sort of person writes fiction about the past? It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent. It is necessary to know that the people who live there are not the same as people now. It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the living. It is helpful to have encountered the dead firsthand, in the form of ghosts.”
—Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Dead Are Real”
recently, new yorker writer larissa macfarquhar penned a fantastic piece on moral philosopher, derek parfit. according to macfarquhar, parfit holds many curiously strong opinions including this one: “although he admired some skyscrapers, he believed that architecture had generally declined since 1840, and the world had grown uglier.”
too bad my pocketbook doesn’t give one fig about good taste. until we win the lottery, i’ll keep brainstorming budget-friendly ways to help parfit feel better about the world. i’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again: i’m a giver.
(via decor8)
“hospitals. That was what ought to happen, he believed. What would happen would depend upon insurance companies and regulations. As long as hospitals were paid by the procedure, they obviously had no incentive to leave the simpler treatments to clinics. And as long as hospitals competed with other hospitals for patients they would continue to add ever more facilities, growing ever more expensive: in health care, because of the perverse incentives that insurance put in place, competition actually raised prices rather than lowered them. There needed to be some kind of integrated managed-care system...”
—Larissa MacFarquhar
(via Eduardo Rosales)
Highlights around the web from last few weeks
A whole week can quickly be consumed by the process of pitching and reporting. I didn’t have the chance to do the normal Longform blogging I’d wanted to but here are some of the highlights, both longform and not, I came across during the last week or so.
TOC
1) Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Aaron Swartz
2) Enlightened
3) Capturing The Friedmans
4) This American Life: Harper High School
5) Marclay’s The Clock
6) Belle & Sebastian doc @ Pitchfork
7) David Samuels on the mini bar
“that a low-cost strategy only works when you have a high-cost competitor.”
—Larissa MacFarquhar
(via Eduardo Rosales)
“Man, this is gonna be complicated, because we have one god and no rituals to speak of, and you guys have multiple gods and lots of rituals.â And so in the end they settled on one god with lots of rituals. Then they went over to the Greeks, and this was a tough one, because the concept of God as Christ taught it was that God exists within the universe, but the Greeks thought that God existed above the universe, and in the negotiations Christianity adopted the Zeus view of God.â These negotiations culminated in the fourth century, at the Council of Nicaea, where under the orders of Constantine...”
—Larissa MacFarquhar
(via Eduardo Rosales)
