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Newsletter: 2022-07-28
View from the office from a north-side conference room
Contents
- Update
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Around the Internet
- Past Lives of the Paragraph: A joyous history of a funny little typographic convention that enabled us to see the book or text, in general, as something that can have extractable nuggets versus being an atomic thing itself: the paragraph!
- 50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down, economics study says. After three decades of hearing this bit of conservative orthodoxy, these data suggest that at-last, once-and-for-all, trickle-down economics is a sham. The widening wealth gap (not income gap) suggests that the some of the society-destabilizing chaos of today finds its root in the doctrinaire stances of the Reagan/Bush program.
- Humans Have Always Been Wrong About Humans: We know the story of human civilization: nomads are doing great, discover agriculture and suddenly have property to horde. They empower and ennoble warriors to kings, fight it out with spears and evolve those weapons to include nuclear missiles, the IMF, and mutually-assured destruction. Another warrior caste erupts on the side: the shamans, the visionaries, and later the tax-free holdings of Joel Osteen. But anthropology has started tossing a wrench in this story: early human society was not universally nomadic unto agrarian/proto-monarchy.
Pervasive Sameness
In a previous post, I complained about globalized fashion producing the same, boring, classless, tasteless, shapeless garments for the .01% regardless of the ostensible home-country of the label. But this blanding the world with on brand isn’t limited to clothing labels. At several certain class tiers, one can expect to find the exact same experience ‘round the world.
- There’s a Shakespeare and Company in Paris and New York
- There are Pret à Mangers all over Manhattan, Paris, and London
- Virginia’s “Five Guys” can be found on Broadway (NYC), all over the South and
even across the street from “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”
- …which, itself, is also findable in New York.
- New York’s Shake Shack can be found in London or Jeddah
Denmark’s Joe and the Juice looks like this on Broadway, by my house (with Byron):
Upper West Side, with Byron
and looks like this in SoHo:
In London
The Good Samaritan, a Warrior
I’m a little confused by Elisjsha Dicken being called a “Good Samaritan” e.g.: Pictured: Good Samaritan, 22, who killed Indiana mall gunman after he shot (yet another) would be mass-shooter in an American “soft-target” venue (here, a mall).
That parable, as recounted in the gospel of Luke was about, as I read it, a Samaritan finding a man who had been beaten and robbed by thieves who gave the victim comfort and aid (cash, a ride, an inn, wound dressings, etc.) with no expectation of remuneration.
The Samaritan did not happen upon the assault and execute the thieves. Jesus says, after relaying the parable, that its message is for those who would follow Him to truly love their neighbor as their own – regardless of tribal identity (Levite, Samaritan, etc.). It’s a bit of a perversion of Christianity that I read in the New Testament to revise the Good Samaritan into Batman (“Look, it’s the Sam-Signal! To the Sam-Donkey, Robin!”).