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4,048 books
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4,629 voters
Versailles was built to give France a tangible demonstration that the people was nothing and the king everything.
“The twenty-seventh was Blackstar, or simply (the symbol of blackstar) - a suggestion that the A-Z was over, but there was more to come, beyond the known alphabet, beyond ordinary language; a second set of letters, communications, a rebirth. Inside the A to Z, and all the possible combinations of songs, styles, secrets, themes, discoveries, redirections, emotional climaxes, sheer drama, tension, relief, beauty, there was all you needed to know in order to construct and understand the language of Bowie
(re morley's alphabet of bowie albums)”
― The Age of Bowie
(re morley's alphabet of bowie albums)”
― The Age of Bowie
“The Great Transformation (1944) that ‘the utopian experiment of a self-regulating market will be no more than a memory’. In the 1980s, the decade of deregulation and privatization in the West, however, this experiment was revived. The collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened the bland fanatics, who had been intellectually nurtured during the Cold War in a ‘paradise’, as Niebuhr called it, albeit one ‘suspended in a hell of global insecurity’. The old Hegelian-Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Fukuyama’s influential end-of-history hypothesis.”
― Age of Anger: A History of the Present
― Age of Anger: A History of the Present
“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”
― 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
― 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
“Herzl wrote The Jewish State, his path-breaking manifesto of Zionism, in 1895 under the influence of Wagner, one of the nineteenth century’s most notorious anti-Semites.”
― Age of Anger: A History of the Present
― Age of Anger: A History of the Present
“Ultimately, forgiveness is usually about one thing—“This is for me, not for you.” Hatred is exhausting; forgiveness, or even just indifference, is freeing. To quote Booker T. Washington, “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.” Belittle and distort and consume. Forgiveness seems to be at least somewhat good for your health—victims who show spontaneous forgiveness, or who have gone through forgiveness therapy (as opposed to “anger validation therapy”) show improvements in general health, cardiovascular function, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Chapter 14 explored how compassion readily, perhaps inevitably, contains elements of self-interest. The compassionate granting of forgiveness epitomizes this.41”
― Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
― Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Michael’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Michael’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
90 books
|
1,227 friends
3,986 books
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51 friends
2 books
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6,456 friends
1,258 books
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28 friends
417 books
|
327 friends
1,535 books
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95 friends
13,853 books
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1,048 friends
230 books
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16 friends
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