only

I know Weiss very well. There is no real world to Abe Weiss. There’s only what’s on TV and in the newspapers.

-Tom Wolfe The Bonfire of the Vanities

in June

Cather spent much of her childhood in Red Cloud, six miles up the road, and for many people who love her writing, and perhaps for some who don’t, the Cather Prairie is one of the loveliest places on earth. You park at the top of a hill and follow a path down to a gulch, where a creek widens into a pond. At the bottom, you no longer see traces of modern civilization, though you can hear trucks on Route 281 as they clamber out of the Kansas flats. The land here was never plowed, and with careful cultivation it preserves the prairie as Cather roamed it, in the eighteen-eighties—an immemorial zone of grass, trees, birds, water, and wind. You can picture one of Cather’s pioneer women—Alexandra Bergson, the canny farm owner in “O Pioneers!”; Thea Kronborg, the budding operatic soprano in “The Song of the Lark”; Ántonia Shimerda, the buffeted heroine of “My Ántonia”—coming over the top of the hill. When I was last there, in June, the sky was a blaring blue and the hills were a murmur of greens. The air was hot and heavy enough that thoughts evaporated from my mind. I lay under a cottonwood tree and listened to leaves and grass swaying . . .

–Alex Ross ‘A Walk in Willa Cather’s Prairie‘ The New Yorker

stocks

Tell which stocks are dogs.
And which stocks are blue-ribbon winners.

-Ernest Slyman ‘Dogs of Wall Street‘ The New York Times

link

Like another great mind of his time, Albert Einstein, Keynes had a preternatural ability to see relationships between complex phenomena entirely differently than generations of experts before him.

— Benn Steil The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order

idea

Unless you are able to sell your ideas, you might as well not have had them.

–Kenneth Roman, Joel Raphaelson Writing That Works; How to Communicate Effectively In Business 

first

While we were on our way [to Tiananmen Square], the military charged in and slaughtered hundreds of protesters. With the help of university students, we covered the aftermath of the massacre as the government imposed martial law in Beijing. The students had loaned us bicycles, and one night, after curfew, they led us to a large shed near a hospital. We broke in and discovered that it was filled with body bags of the murdered protesters. I uncovered the bodies, and as it was dark, I had to use the flash on my camera. This aroused attention from a trailer near the shed and the authorities began to show up with flashlights. We ran and managed to get away on our bikes. These students had risked their lives for us. Since we feared having the film confiscated at the international airport, we made our way to Guangzhou on a domestic flight. Because there was a news blackout, the authorities in Guangzhou were not aware enough to search us at the airport and we took a train to Hong Kong, where Joe wrote the story. I connected with Newsweek and sent the film to the Voice in their pouch. The Voice was the first paper anywhere to publish photographs of the murdered Chinese citizens.

-James Hamilton ‘The Village in 41 photos‘ The Village Voice

concept

“Whether artists are Chinese or French is not important,” said Mr. Huang, who lives and works outside Paris. “I think the duty of the artist is to deconstruct the concept of nationality. There is going to be a day when there is no concept of nationality.”

-Jane Perlez ‘Where the Wild Things Are: China’s Art Dreamers at the Guggenheim‘ The New York Times

joy

But she suggested that the job, toward the end, wasn’t bringing her “joy” anymore. (Over the course of a 40-minute interview, she said “joy,” “joyful” or “joyous” nine times.) Still, Fox News was prepared to pay her more than $20 million a year for the job she wasn’t born to do. NBC also made an impressive offer, somewhere north of $15 million.

-John Koblin ‘Megyn Kelly Is Ready for Her Morning Closeup‘ The New York Times Magazine

doc

all

There were dinners like this all over the East Side of Manhattan every night, he had soon discovered, lavish parties that were all English or all French or all Italian or all European; no Americans, in any case.

-Tom Wolfe The Bonfire of the Vanities