permanent

"Idi Amin's lesson is permanent."

~~ from "A Wife's Story" by Bharati Mukherjee

tremendous

"Tremendous" is how a recent reader described the final pages of Fight for Your Long Day.

adolescence

In this telling, the house burns down.

the great books

While I agree that "The Left Should Defend Classical Education" (i.e. reading Western classics, "the great books," Plato, Hobbes, Melville, Nietzsche, and so on), I haven't yet had a chance to read Liza Featherstone's article. 

Letter from Cape Town, profile from France

For recent online reading, I appreciated the comical moments in Adam Gopnik's portrait of the far-right Algerian immigrant, media celebrity, and French presidential candidate in The New Yorker as well as this South African business about Nikolai Gogol and stolen noses in Harper's Magazine.

race stuff

"But when I make my way over to [Officer] Inoue, he tells me that if I'm going to try some Asian crap it won't work, so I ask him what the hell that even means.

"The race stuff, he says. You're Asian, and I'm Asian, so you think we have some kind of connection. I'm telling you right now that we don't. I'm Japanese, and you're either Chinese or Korean. There's no connection here, so please sit down and wait while my backup gets here."

~~ from Jeff Chon's "There's No Connection Here" in King Ludd's Rag, No. 5, May 2021