November 2011
6 posts
Dalton Trumbo on war
If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us. They will not be us the guys who grow wheat and turn it into food the guys who make clothes and paper and houses and tiles the guys who build dams and power plants and string the long moaning high tension wires the guys who crack crude oil down into a dozen different...
Gay Talese on journalism
Journalism is for the young. Young people who go into journalism as a calling are entering, I think, the most worthwhile profession that is possible, and the reason I say that is that there is no profession or industry or calling that tries very hard to tell the truth and to sell the truth and to make the truth make money. The truth is hard, first of all, to get. And harder still to communicate....
Pat Forde on the scandal at Syracuse
This issue is far bigger than sports. And as Joe Paterno found out earlier this month, there is a big, unforgiving world outside the cocoon of college sports that doesn’t care how many games you won or how long you’ve worked at a university if you have an accused pedophile on your staff or in your building.
— Pat Forde
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Charles P. Pierce on the Penn State scandal
If that blights Joe Paterno’s declining years, that’s too bad. If that takes a chunk out of the endowment, hold a damn bake sale. If that means that Penn State spends some time being known as the university where a child got raped, that’s what happens when you’re a university where a child got raped. Any sympathy for this institution went down the drain in the shower room...
Hunter S. Thompson on breakfast
I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor...
Jeff MacGregor on W.C. Heinz on life
What Bill Heinz knows and what Bill Heinz wrote is that life is the biggest fix of them all, and every one of us was bought the day we were born. Maybe you can pick the round you go down, or hold out for more money, or book yourself into the main event in a bigger room. But for all the training and the roadwork, for all the hours and weeks and years spent in patient, useless practice, for all the...
