Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Antonio Garcia Martinez • Twilight of the Media Elites
The specialized dialect and narrow education of doctors, academics, economists, social scientists, military officers, investment bankers, and government bureaucrats keeps each sector locked in its narrow role. The overarching structure of the corporate state and the idea of the common good are irrelevant to specialists. They exist to make the syste
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
breakthroughs, only gesture, celebrity quietism, rage, symptom, backlash.
Renata Adler • After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction
The transformations of the 1970s broke up the old party alignment and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new social arrangements, new ways of living. They ref
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
The fact is, “exceptional Negroes” have always been a staple of an apartheid-like educational system that separates the “gifted” from the “normal,” and both from the “naughty” or “underachieving.” Sticks and stones will only break my bones, but words can lift or crush me.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in
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It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work: this is why, as leftist critics often complain, the media will always talk about how, say, a transport strike is likely to inconvenience the public, in their capacity of commuters, but it will never occur to them that those striking are themselves part of the public—or that i
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