Trish > Books: journalism‎ (109)

“Dealing with threats against journalists had become a sadly routine part of my work life, but each time a new one surfaced a feeling of discouragement about what the country had become would come over me again.”

“Maybe we should be better at inculcating all citizens—now all potential publishers—with a sense of social responsibility…I continued to believe the risks that came with freedom were worth the price…I also believe The Times had been right, in its North Korea reporting and other sensitive national security stories, to give the government a chance to responds before publication. Many readers saw that process as a surrender…

“…It was important to debate whether The Times had been timid then or at other times, but context was important: our newsroom regularly decided that the government’s objections were too abstract, not believable, insufficiently weighty, or given by officials too far down the food chain to know, and then resolved to move ahead with publishing. But it’s not a science. Editors sometimes get it wrong. National security is intrinsically the hardest of the calls they have to make…If we are ever forced to defend against a criminal charge, I wanted our legal narrative to be one of responsibility, serious deliberation, and a demonstrable concern about the public’s best interests.”

“The people have a right to clear air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit for all the people.”

“[Range Resources] tried to appeal to those who stood to make money with an unusual letter writing campaign. One mass mailing was addressed to a fictitious ‘Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmo at 10 Cash-Strapped Lane.’ It urged residents to bring pressure on their local officials to allow companies wide latitude to drill where they needed to, or there’d be no gas, and ‘no gas means no royalties.’”

“Economists describe the Tragedy of the Commons like this: cattle herders sharing a pasture will inevitably place the needs of their cows above the needs of others’, adding cow after cow and taking more than their share of the common grass. This ‘free rider’ takes advantage of the commons, and consumes it until it’s gone. This, the argument goes, is human nature, which sets individual gain over collective good. Traditionally, the Tragedy of the Commons has supported the case for individual property rights: since it’s impossible for people to act together to protect commonly held assets, we might as well carve up those assets and leave individuals to look after their own. But what if the commons did not need to end in tragedy? What if people were able to work out effective practices of sharing the commons and transmit those traditions to their descendants? Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, argued that the solution to the Tragedy of the Commons for the twenty-first century lies in common sense. Sharing has succeeded in the past and could succeed in the future. Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. She died in 2012.”

“In the long term, there was a clear advantage for the budgets of Milwaukee Country and the Milwaukee Public Schools, which faced problems funding retiree health care and pensions far in excess of the typical local government in Wisconsin…An actuary found that the district lowered its projected obligation to retirees by a whopping $1 billion, or 42 percent, between 2009 and 2011.”

"Manau carried with him the shame of an exposed man who had imagined his mediocrity to be a secret."

"….it didn’t seem at this [early] hour to be a city but a museum of a city, a place she was viewing as if from some distant future, an artist’s model built to demonstrate how human beings once lived…"

“They live in neat little houses lined up next to the other, like cells in a convent. Each has a wife, kids, short hair, clear ideas. She meets with seven of them…to her they seem almost like clones. It takes all her talent to find a distinctive quality in each of them. But as with every subject she writes about, this is what fascinates her most: the human element.”

“The main point is that I’ve always acted alone,” he says. “Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else.”

“America has disappointed me…It’s like when you’re completely in love with a person, and you get married, and then day after day, you realize that the person isn’t as exceptional, as extraordinary or marvelous or good, or intelligent, as you thought. The U.S. has been like a bad husband. It betrays me every day.” “But you like Americans,” her colleague insists. “Yes, of course, I love children,” she answers.

The Great Lakes are the largest expanse

The Great Lakes are the largest expanse of freshwater in the world.

The Great Lakes are in the midst of a slow-motion ecological catastrophe begun by opening to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic.

Freshwater is the world's most precious natural resource.

“The intuition is that a very large lake like this would be slow to respond somehow to climate change. But in fact we’re finding that its particularly sensitive.”

"Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has some terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West. the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future."

"To strike it rich is still the Texas dream...Texans are always talking about how much they loved the state, but I wondered where was the evidence of that love."

"I’ll tell you something. I don’t think my family were originally Arabs…I think [we] were Sabean who converted to Islam,” said Mahmoud.

“…who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day. ‘Each of us has a measure of criminality…’”

"Wright offered to the world in his protest novel Native Son an image of blackness that made it synonymous with dehumanization, with the absence of feeling. His character Bigger Thomas embodied a lovelessness so relentless it struck a chord of terror in the minds of black activists who had been struggling to counter similar images of blackness emerging from the white imagination.

In his autobiography, Black Boy, Wright dared to tell the world that he believed dehumanization had happened to many black folks, that ongoing racial genocide had left us damaged, forever wounded in the space where we would know love."

"I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom."

“In the North, Myrdal wrote, ‘almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs’—that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall.”

“Now you put you some butter and some buttermilk on it,” she says, “and it make you want to hurt yourself.”

“He remembered one night in particular. He was wearing a black mohair suit he ordered specifically for the occasion from the tailor who dressed Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra. He wore a black tie with a burgundy stripe, a white tab-collar shirt, gold cuff links, black shoes, black silk socks, and a white handkerchief with his initials, RPF, embroidered in silver.”

"It was spite," George would say of the decisions he made at that moment in his life…"That’s why I preach today, Do not do spite," he said. "Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim [at] and goes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it."

“The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has gradually been undermined by socialist and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.”

“Many journalists do not recognize their bias any more than a fish recognizes it is wet: The swim in an ocean of like-minded professionals. Being pro-choice on abortion was simply the position of everyone they knew, while opposition to abortion rights was, by definition, 'controversial.'”

“In contrast to Trump. Ryan’s approach reflected the distinctive sort of conservatism that had flourished in Wisconsin: principled, pragmatic, reformist, but not afraid of taking on tough, controversial issues.”

“Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”

"the preconditions for the rise of a demagogic dictator is a dumbed-down populace, a gullible electorate, and a common enemy or group or scapegoats upon which to focus public enmity. The more educated a society is, Hayek says, the more diverse their tastes and values will be…the flip side being that ‘if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and common instincts and tastes prevail.’"