Tim Combes > Recent Status Updates

I need Josh Safdie to direct this ASAP

Took a second for it to find its footing (or me to find mine) but now we're cookin

My only gripe, if it could accurately be called that, with this book so far is that Danielewski is doing a hell of a lot of foreshadowing. Which is not inherently bad but he’s writing himself one hell of a check I hope he can cash.

No feeling like being 70 pages into a 1228 page book and already knowing you’re gonna miss it like hell when you’re done and dreading the thought of finishing it.

“What makes the ADL’s antipathy to the phrase ‘river to the sea’ so ironic is that [. . .] Israeli leaders use similar expressions all the time”

“Netanyahu’s Likud party declares ‘between the sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.’ And while the ADL can speculate how a Palestinian state would treat Jews [. . .] Israel’s treatment of Palestinians isn’t hypothetical.”

“Under international law, using civilians as “human shields” means forcing them to live alongside military targets, it doesn’t mean fighting in an area that just happens to have civilians around. Hamas certainly does the latter. . . but that’s typical of insurgent groups. No guerrilla force puts on brightly colored uniforms, walks into an open field, and takes on a vastly more powerful conventional army.”

I'm gonna miss this book when I'm done

“He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that, in the long run, all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they could not alter”

(Punctuation a guess. Audiobooks 🫡)

“Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

Perhaps the best microcosm of the Sacklers’ myopia and wealth is that one of them, upon hearing that they’d be featured on Last Week Tonight, complained “how is my son supposed to apply to high school in September?”

Keefe including private Sackler Family WhatsApp correspondence is diabolical and I love it

Not for nothing, Pete Buttigieg worked for McKinsey 🤢🤮

Thank god Jeffrey Wright is a good person

Keefe loves the word “enclave”

I shouldn’t be shocked by the corruption in the justice department or the self-flagellating cowardice of the NYT but….. man it’s bad

Shocking to think that there was a time where hiring Rudy Guiliani as in house counsel was considered a good pr move

Everything the Sacklers do leading up to the introduction of OxyContin feels like run of the mill irresponsible capitalism. Bad but mundane. It’s how they dig their heels in after they know it’s killing people that makes them truly evil.

A century earlier, Bayer had marketed Heroin as morphine without the unpleasant side effects, even though Heroin was actually more powerful than morphine and every bit as addictive. Now, in internal discussions at Purdue. . . Richard [Sackler] and his colleagues entertained the notion of a similar marketing strategy.”

The Hague. All of them.

“Heroin was invented by the same research team that invented aspirin”

I guess somebody had to invent heroin but with a gun to my head I wouldn’t have guessed Bayer