Support Pullquote, upgrade to Pro!
(Or just tweet your Pullquote for free!)
With Pullquote Pro, you'll get to:
- share on Facebook
- schedule tweets
- tweet from multiple accounts
- edit quotes
- customize colors
- change fonts
- save and index quotes
- private quotes
Choose a plan: $5/month $50/year (includes free access to any new features)
Recent quotes:
The meaning crisis, and how we rescue young men from reactionary politics - The Skeptic
How do you make ‘strong’ men? According to the right, it’s by making them cruel. “Owning the libs” isn’t just entertainment and sport, it’s important psychological training for the civil war they believe is to come. Men must be callous if they’re going to ignore the demands for compassion that are weakening our society. If they can’t laugh in the face of someone who claims to be suffering, how will they be able to make the hard decisions needed to keep our country safe and prosperous? That’s the meaning narrative that seems to be attracting a significant portion of young men. It simultaneously shields them from all the moral obligations that progressive society wants to place on them, while providing them an alternative set of obligations that feel more empowering to them to fulfil. They get to be warriors who stand against the horde that threatens to overrun their society, both internal and external. They get to stand athwart history and shout “stop”.
As U.S. election looms, this ‘rumor researcher’ tracks—and combats—falsehoods in real time | Science | AAAS
After the war, Japanese American researcher Tamotsu Shibutani helped change how rumors were seen, casting them as a rational response to disasters and uncertainty. To Shibutani, who had spent the war imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in California, rumor was more of a verb than a noun, a collective process of making sense of the world. His view was heavily influenced by his experience in the camp, Starbird notes, where the community used rumors to try and cope with the “horrible uncertainty” they faced. “In times of crisis and anxiety and these kinds of conditions, to participate in rumoring is a natural thing to do, and then there’s other folks that are going to exploit that,” she says. “Those dynamics have always been there.”
Starbird initially expected her research to tell a positive story: how rumors spread by some users are quickly fact checked and corrected by others. “I’d sort of seen that in the early data, where we would see rumors and misinformation, but they were quickly corrected,” Starbird says. “They weren’t causing a lot of damage, as far as we could tell.” It was the idea of a self-correcting crowd, a kind of Wikipedia in the wild.
But her first few studies quickly disabused her of this notion. “We could really see, especially between 2013 and 2015, that rumors and misinformation were becoming a larger and larger part of the discourse online during these crisis events,” she says. Rumors were rarely being corrected—and when they were, the correction usually came too late and reached far fewer people than the original, false information. A rumor that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag attack by Navy SEALs, for instance, circulated on Twitter (now X) for days. Social media algorithms, designed to keep people’s attention, often advantaged the sensational. “And it turns out that falsehoods and conspiracy theories tend to be more sensational than the truth,” Starbird says.
How to Write Stories Readers Will Love by Knowing the Zeitgeist - Author Media
The darker things are in real life, the more people long for self sacrificial heroes.
The antihero does the right thing for selfish reasons. The true hero does the right thing for selfless reasons. It’s the difference between Batman and Superman. When one is waxing, the other is waning. Sometimes Superman is more appealing, and sometimes Batman is more appealing.
Hegel on Bastille Day
Hegel gathered friends and colleagues and ordered top-shelf champagne — Champagne Sillery, the most distinguished of its day. He passed bottles around the table, but “when it became clear that nobody at the table knew exactly why they should be drinking to that particular day, Hegel turned in mock astonishment and with raised voice declared, ‘This glass is for the 14th of July, 1789 — to the storming of the Bastille.’”
Needless to say, this toast astonished the students there, among them Eduard Gans, who would later become Marx’s law professor. How could Hegel be so reckless to express such dangerous sympathies at the height of Restoration Europe?
Hegel once told his friend Immanuel Niethammer that to be a philosopher was to be an “expositus,” an exposed person. Once the French Revolution rediscovered that Nous, reason, governs the world, Hegel, the philosopher of reason, would inevitably find himself — whether he liked it or not as a Prussian state philosophy professor — allied to those progressive and potentially rebellious forces. The philosophy of absolute reason thus had real political consequences.
Henry Kissinger, America’s Most Notorious War Criminal, Dies At 100 | HuffPost Latest News
The former led to perhaps the most infamous crime Kissinger committed: a secret four-year bombing campaign in Cambodia that killed an untold number of civilians, despite the fact that it was a neutral nation with which the United States was not at war.
During his time in charge of the American foreign policy machine, Kissinger also directed illegal arms sales to Pakistan as it carried out a brutal crackdown on its Bengali population in 1971. He supported the 1973 military coup that overthrew a democratically elected socialist government in Chile, gave the go-ahead to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, and backed Argentina’s repressive military dictatorship as it launched its “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists in 1976. His policies during the Ford administration also fueled civil wars in Africa, most notably in Angola.
The chaos wrought by the FOMC keeps unfolding | National Mortgage News
"What's interesting is almost none [of my clients] have a lot of perspective about the mortgage business. A lot of them have never been in an environment that is predominantly purchase. I was raised in that environment. I spent my first 20 years in an environment where we didn't have refinances really. Everything was a purchase. I think they're struggling with that. And then the second shoe that hit them all is margin compression, and product compression, which they weren't expecting. Almost everybody's business model that I saw underestimated the amount of compression on the gross revenue side of their business."
Podcast: Why Income Inequality and ‘Counter-Elites’ Spell Bad News for the UK - Bloomberg
Turchin says the fall of a ruling class is almost always driven by the same set of circumstances, the main one being overproduction of elites. If you have a long period of peace and prosperity, he says, that will create more elites than there are high status jobs. The result is an angry upper class, who fast become counter-elites.
How a Disaster Expert Prepares for the Worst | The New Yorker
“We’re going to be using a lot of ‘when’ today. I don’t use ‘if.’ I don’t touch wood too much,” Easthope said. “It is when, when these emergencies happen.” In spite of her experiences witnessing protocols fail or be subverted, Easthope still argues strongly for disaster and recovery plans. She has no time for people (normally male uniformed commanders) who believe they are dealing with something that no one has ever suffered through before. “Don’t go out there with ‘unique.’ Don’t go out there with ‘unprecedented.’ Don’t go out there with ‘This was a terrible incident we couldn’t have foreseen,’ ” she said. “You are walking plowed, furrowed fields that other people have walked, and they are there to guide and support you.”
The Hysterical Style in American Academe
ducation is, as the philosopher Henry Bugbee tells it, “more fundamentally the task of placement within the fullness of historical time — so that it may become the time of our lives — than it is in adjustment simply in contemporaneous relationship to the things around us.” That is, reading, thinking, and studying are not simply in the service of conforming to the current arrangement of the world, but of developing a long view of human nature that allows us to consider more seriously what might be good as such for human beings, both individually and in community, thereby deepening our sense of what we might mean, for instance, by words like “justice.” This should be especially true for those devoted to the study of human things: philosophy, literature, history, languages, and so on.
[Article] The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter | Harper's Magazine
the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world
Endnotes on 2020: Crypto and Beyond
The community split was chaotic, and one can see this in how the channels of communication were split up in the divorce: /r/bitcoin stayed under the control of supporters of Bitcoin (BTC). /r/btc was controlled by supporters of Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Bitcoin.org was controlled by supporters of Bitcoin (BTC). Bitcoin.com on the other hand was controlled by supporters of Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Each side claimed themselves to be the true Bitcoin. The result looked remarkably similar to one of those civil wars that happens from time to time that results in a country splitting in half, the two halves calling themselves almost identical names that differ only in which subset of the words "democratic", "people's" and "republic" appears on each side. Neither side had the ability to destroy the other, and of course there was no higher authority to adjudicate the dispute.
Alexander Korda: Churchill’s Man in Hollywood | Finest Hour 179
In Churchill’s George V screenplay, the following line appears: “In all her wars, England always wins one battle—the last.” In 1942, he delivered the same line to tremendous applause, in what he termed “The Bright Gleam of Victory” speech.
Bill Moyers and Heather Cox Richardson on Her Daily Letters – BillMoyers.com
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: The newsletter was completely an accident, and I have my readers to thank for it. I had on Facebook a professional page that I posted on about once a week. And I hadn’t written on it in a while in the summer last year because I was actually busy moving. And I was all set to get in the car and drive from my home in Maine to teach in Boston. And I happened to be stung by a yellow-jacket, and I’m allergic to them. And I didn’t have my EpiPen nearby. So I didn’t dare get on the road until I knew how badly I would react. And I thought, “Well, I haven’t written in a while on my Facebook page.” And I know that on Friday, Friday the 13th, September 13th, Adam Schiff wrote a letter to the acting director of national intelligence at the time saying, “We know there’s a whistleblower complaint out there. And we know that you have it, and we know that you’re supposed to give it to us, and you’re not. And that means that we have to assume it’s a really big deal. Hand the stupid thing over.” And of course, I paraphrase, but that was the gist of it. And I recognized because I’m a political historian, that this was the first time that a member of Congress had found a specific law that they were accusing a specific member of the executive branch of violating. So I thought, you know, I oughta put that down, ’cause this is a really important moment. If you knew what you were looking for, it was a big moment. So I wrote it down, and then got myself back to Boston and got home and there were a ton of questions about what I’d written. And it was clear that the readers wanted to know more. They seemed to want to know the answers, so I wrote again, I think it was two nights later on the 17th. And I’ve written every night since because questions just poured in, and people flooded me with questions about what was going on, and who were the players, and how was this going to play out? And what were the laws, and why should I have any hope that this was gonna turn out in a good way? And this was just something that really was sort of reader-driven, not driven by me at all. And I think that’s probably why it’s had such staying power.
The Eerie Parallels Between Coronavirus and the Bubonic Plague - Rolling Stone
Crises like these — whether it’s a crisis of political legitimacy, or a pandemic that demands response, or some kind of major external war that crops up out of nowhere — the chances are good that whatever snaps under the pressure of that crisis was probably straining already, was probably barely chugging along already. There’s some kind of deep problem that a crisis is going to expose, bring to the fore, and then break very dramatically for everybody to see.
We see the crisis and we see the break — and we equate the two. We’re narrative creatures. That’s how we understand the world. We understand things as a story with a climax, and the break has to be the climax. It’s very hard for us to turn a more analytical eye and see the collection of very small things that lead up to a systemic break. It’s just difficult. But these disasters don’t create these trends so much as they supercharge them.
You Think We’re Self-Obsessed Now? The 19th Century Would Like A Word | FiveThirtyEight
After 14 years, Kaplan and his colleagues finally had their “Bibliography of American Autobiographies.” They ended up identifying 6,377 autobiographies published in the U.S. between 1675 and the 1940s, and their data shows the genre’s notable growth. Between 1800 and 1809, Americans published a total of just 27 autobiographies. One century later, during the decade between 1900 and 1909, that number had exploded to 569, easily outpacing population growth.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race | Discover Magazine
One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race | Discover Magazine
While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
Only eat oysters in months with an 'r'? Rule of thumb is at least 4,000 years old -- ScienceDaily
Cannarozzi and Kowalewski, Thompson Chair of Invertebrate Paleontology, analyzed oysters and snails from a 230-foot-wide, 4,300-year-old shell ring on St. Catherines Island and compared them with live oysters and snails. They found that island inhabitants were primarily harvesting oysters during late fall, winter and spring, which also suggested the presence of people on the island tapered off during the summer.
The seasonality of the shell ring may be one of the earliest records of sustainable harvesting, Cannarozzi said. Oysters in the Southeast spawn from May to October, and avoiding oyster collection in the summer may help replenish their numbers.
Fake doctor saved thousands of infants and changed medical history
But for all his showbiz, Couney was in the lifesaving business, and he took it seriously. The exhibit was immaculate. When new children arrived, dropped off by panicked parents who knew Couney could help them where hospitals could not, they were immediately bathed, rubbed with alcohol and swaddled tight, then “placed in an incubator kept at 96 or so degrees, depending on the patient. Every two hours, those who could suckle were carried upstairs on a tiny elevator and fed by breast by wet nurses who lived in the building. The rest [were fed by] a funneled spoon.”
Early humans evolved in ecosystems unlike any found today -- ScienceDaily
For example, modern African ecosystems are dominated by ruminants -- relatives of cows and antelopes that have four compartments in their stomachs to thoroughly break down food. Non-ruminants equipped with simple stomachs are comparatively rare, with at most eight species coexisting in the same area today. Non-ruminants, including relatives of elephants, zebras, hippos, rhinos and pigs, are like digestive conveyor belts, said Faith. They eat larger quantities of plants to make up for their inefficient digestion. In contrast to the present-day pattern, eastern African fossil records document landscapes rich in non-ruminant communities, with dozens of species co-existing within the same area.
Fossil and modern communities were also vastly different in terms of body sizes. The fossil records document lots more megaherbivores than their modern counterparts. A steady decline of megaherbivores began 4.5 million years ago until they represented a more modern distribution 700,000 years ago.
Delay Discounting as a Transdiagnostic Process in Psychiatric Disorders: A Meta-analysis | Psychiatry | JAMA Psychiatry | JAMA Network
In this meta-analysis of 57 effect sizes from 43 studies across 8 diagnostic categories, robust differences in delay discounting were observed between people with psychiatric disorders and controls. Most individuals with disorders (including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder) exhibited steeper discounting compared with controls, whereas those with anorexia nervosa exhibited shallower discounting compared with controls.
One by one, historical events are rewritten by the Orbán regime – Hungarian Spectrum
The Budapest Festival Orchestra was performing an all-Beethoven concert on August 18, and Iván Fischer decided to give away 400 tickets to the German visitors. And they came. As he said later, they could easily be spotted by their casual outfits. Once the concert was over, a large group of diplomats from the West German Embassy thanked Fischer for his gesture. They told him that during intermission they had distributed pamphlets to the refugees informing them of the narrow window of opportunity at Sopron the next day. Of course, the concert was just one of the places where the German refugees could be reached, but this story is further proof of the joint domestic and international effort to help the refugees.
I should add that Prime Minister Miklós Németh paid several visits to the Zugliget temporary shelter. Opposition leaders were giving the government advice on possible ways to solve the problem, as László Kovács, deputy to Gyula Horn, wrote in an article yesterday titled “On the background of the opening of the borders.”
But this is not how the Orbán government wants Hungarians to remember the summer of 1989. As we know, Helmut Kohl’s government felt enormous gratitude for what the Germans considered to be a courageous and humane gesture involving considerable danger considering the still fluid political situation in the Soviet Union. As Boris Kálnoky relates in his article “Merkels überraschend neuer Ton bei ihrem Orbán-Besuch,” Zoltán Balog, former politician and apparently future bishop, said at a two-day conference on the Pan-European Picnic’s thirtieth anniversary that “this praise of the Germans for the former communist dictatorship disturbed us, dissidents even then, and it bothers us to this day.” He claimed that “without our pressure, the communists would never have changed.”
'Extraordinary' 500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time | Books | The Guardian
“It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries,” said Wilson-Lee. “The idea that this object which was so central to this extraordinary early 16th-century project and which one always thought of with this great sense of loss, of what could have been if this had been preserved, for it then to just show up in Copenhagen perfectly preserved, at least 350 years after its last mention in Spain …”
Game Of Thrones brutally asserts that the game in question will have no winner (experts)
It’s not that the final season is failing to live up to my specific expectations of what was supposed to happen, which I avoided having for that reason. It’s that the final season is failing to live up to what I believe a final season should do: enriching the show that came before it. And while the notion that power corrupts has always been at the heart of this story, the way it manifests here feels like a simplification of the show and its ideas, as opposed to a culmination of its larger journey.
The Lab Coat Is on the Hook in the Fight Against Germs - The New York Times
This change took place in part because doctors wanted to spruce up their dubious reputation. Until the advent of such medical reformers as Abraham Flexner and Sir William Osler about 100 years ago, medical training in the United States was notoriously lax. Lectures, not clinical experience, were the norm. It was the age of horse sense and the quack.
So to more closely associate themselves in the public mind with sound science, physicians began donning the lab coats that were being worn by chemists and other laboratory types. These coats were generally beige. But white soon became the standard.
“Our notion since the 1880s, when the germ theory of disease began to take hold, is that microbes hide in dark, dirty places, and that white stands for purity, both material and moral,” said Guenter Risse, a physician and author of “Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals” (Oxford, 1999). “Wearing white coats was a symbol that you were clean.”
Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future? - The Atlantic
One subgroup of scholars, however, did manage to see more of what was coming. Unlike Ehrlich and Simon, they were not vested in a single discipline. They took from each argument and integrated apparently contradictory worldviews. They agreed that Gorbachev was a real reformer and that the Soviet Union had lost legitimacy outside Russia. A few of those integrators saw that the end of the Soviet Union was close at hand and that real reforms would be the catalyst.
The integrators outperformed their colleagues in pretty much every way, but especially trounced them on long-term predictions. Eventually, Tetlock bestowed nicknames (borrowed from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin) on the experts he’d observed: The highly specialized hedgehogs knew “one big thing,” while the integrator foxes knew “many little things.”
