Miri > Recent Status Updates

I never found out the real reason for that year away, but then whose life doesn't contain uncertainties? Some details are lost to time, and in fact it's for the best. To ever feel that you understand anything only means that your mind has turned rigid.

Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable—bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. You might say that throughout his life a philosopher remains as thin-skinned as a child.

Waiting is treacherous. Rather than destroying one with the clean stroke of catastrophe, it erodes the foundation of hope.

Interestingly, this is the sixth book on North Korea I've read, but the first that mentions that Kim Jong-suk was often part of the "holy trinity" of portraits along with her husband and son (at least in the '90s).

Struggling with this. Normally it's right up my alley but I am not in the mood for Yoseb's Man Pride; I've had to bump up the audio to 1.8x normal speed to get through this section (which seems needlessly long). "For a Korean man, the choices were always shit"—yeah, and the Korean women having to beg his permission to get jobs so they can all, you know, eat and stay alive are just having a GRAND old time.

There are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them . . . Conquerors live in dread of the day they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

Very confused because the audio I'm listening to on Overdrive seems to be out of order—storyline is definitely referring to things that have already happened as if they haven't happened yet. Can I have messed up the playback order somehow? Tracking down a print copy so I can figure out what the hell is going on.

I'm a bit . . . underwhelmed. There's a lot about this book that is surprisingly dull, and I can't believe there's so much left to go. Am I going to start liking any of the characters more than I do now?

The decline of serious reporting on policy . . . got much worse in 2016. In 2008, the major networks' nightly newscasts spent a total of 220 minutes on policy. In 2012, it was 114 minutes. In 2016, it was just 32 minutes . . . By contrast, 100 minutes were spent covering my emails. In other words, the political press was telling voters that my emails were three times more important than all the other issues combined.

So yes, things have changed. Some things are a lot better. But many are still bad. And they are connected—the bad is the backlash to the good. Women's advancement has set into motion vast changes that inspire intense feelings of all kinds. Some of us are exhilarated. Others feel a whole lot of rage.

"And now that we've reached this point, allow me to digress." That one sentence summarizes the entire book pretty well.

The chance that someone's secular or freethinking opinion would cause him or her to denounce the whole injustice [of slavery] was extremely high. The chance that someone's religious belief would cause him or her to take a stand against slavery and racism was statistically quite small. But the chance that someone's religious belief would cause him or her to uphold slavery and racism was statistically extremely high.

That was quite a discovery for me, the fact that arbitrary kindness makes me uncomfortable, but that being treated fairly feels good.

"What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom."

This book is absolutely fantastic. I've never seen such a rational, enjoyable, and practical approach to learning a language.

These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.