Tim Combes > Recent Status Updates

Have no idea where this is going and I like that

“Cincinnati is the actual south: they fly confederate flags and eat weird food”

Ouch chuck. I mean you’re not wrong fully but…

I like to think the best of us synthesize the best of the north and the best of the south

In a footnote he references a study that says 40% of Harvard students are athletes, legacies, or the children of faculty/donors. The study estimates only 25% of this 40% would have gotten in on merit. Which means almost a third of Harvard doesn't "deserve" to go to Harvard.

This is in a section talking about affirmative action, but I found it interesting in its own right.

Hate this so much I’m listening at 2.25x (dude is a slow reader so this isn’t QUITE as fast as it sounds)

“And they voted for the Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.”

“She said that we didn’t know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it.”

This is the thematic crux of this book I missed the first time

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