tulia, simba! (Home)

“Beyond whether you regard this shift as dangerous or thrilling, it is having a profound effect on our politics. While they are not often credited for it, single women’s changed circumstances are what’s driving a political agenda that seems to become more progressive every day.”

“…..Just say the word maracuja, which is what they call passion fruit, and I can picture the long raking light of daybreak….”

“But my strong suspicion is that, in any nominating race featuring a female candidate, there will always be a Bernie Sanders—a male alternative whose gender allows him to do everything his female opponent cannot.”

“The entire top of this pint is covered with a thick disc of solid chocolate. Underneath is plain mint ice cream. The chocolate disc represents the huge majority of economic gains that have gone to the top 1% since the end of the recession. Beneath it, the rest of us.”

There are also eating instructions:

“1. Take back of spoon and whack huge chocolate disc into lots of pieces. 2. Let the ice cream soften up a bit, mix the pieces around - and there you have it, Bernie’s Yearning. 3. Dig in, and share it with your fellow Americans!”

“The U.S. suddenly got into crazy range — high 30s to 50 percent,” says Lagrew. “We’ve begun to see the complications in subsequent pregnancies — the placental complications and near-death or death caused from surgery done two to three years prior.  That’s the ‘aha!’ moment now driving the impetus to lower it back down.”

“Yeah, Rwanda’s a very calm place. There’s very little crime on the streets. It’s a wonderful place to write in, in fact. But the longer one stays in Rwanda, one realizes that that calm is not a benign calm. It’s a calm that has been achieved through government repression. It’s a calm that exists because Rwandans cannot and dare not speak up. And once one realizes this, once I realized that this calm was a direct result of the repression, it became quite frightening.”

“Subsequent research teams, at the government’s invitation, have found that the economy is growing, poverty is declining, and people are better nourished. Researchers investigating police corruption were expelled from the country; Rwanda was declared among the least corrupt. A magical nation was thus created.”

“Even before Mr. Guzmán vanished from custody, though, he was making plans for a vanity project that ultimately helped the authorities pinpoint his whereabouts. By most accounts, Mr. Guzmán was not short on ego. His lawyers had filed papers to copyright his name for a big venture he was working on: a movie about his life.”

“A complete breakdown in law and order is just around the corner,” he added, citing a rise in armed opposition to the government, along with heightened violence between Burundi’s mainly Hutu leaders and its Tutsi population. “This will inevitably end in disaster if the current rapidly deteriorating trajectory continues.”

“The “reductive seduction” is not malicious, but it can be reckless. For two reasons. First, it’s dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve mistakenly diagnosed as easily solvable. There is real fallout when well-intentioned people attempt to solve problems without acknowledging the underlying complexity.”