Local Newspapers Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Local Newspapers. Here they are! All 100 of them:

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)
Stop it,” I ground out. “Neither of us will get any sleep if you insist on moving around like that all night.” “I can’t help it. My brain is…” She blew out a breath. “I can’t sleep.” “Try.” The sooner she fell asleep, the sooner I could relax. Relatively speaking. “What great advice,” she said. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. You should start a Dear Dante column in the local newspaper.” “Were you born with a smart mouth, or did your parents buy it for you after their first million?
Ana Huang (King of Wrath (Kings of Sin, #1))
So here's the deal: I speak up in class, I get sent to office. Megan speaks up in class, she's a "strong, assertive model student."I post a few flyers saying that the vending machines on school property are a sign that our school has sold out to corporate-industrial establishment, I get (what else?) Saturday detention. Megan starts a campaign to serve local foods in the lunchroom (oh, and can we please maybe get rid of the soda machines?) and the local newspaper does a write-up about her. She's like me, only not. Not like me at all. She's the golden girl and I'm...tarnished. So forgive me if I hate her a little.
Katie Alender (Bad Girls Don't Die (Bad Girls Don't Die, #1))
Local newspapers are directories of horror - unbelievably vile people doing unbelievably vile things to each other.
Michael Bracewell
Mom, for example, is Procter and Gamble’s perfect repeat customer. Renovation contractors send her personalized Christmas cards. She lives for the Sunday edition of our local newspaper. She thumbs through the “Modern Home” section. She mopes through the rest of the day, unhappy with all her outdated things.
Michael Benzehabe (Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe)
He might be famous (local newspaper or television) for finding it, true—but if fame takes away the thing it celebrates, then Sebastien would prefer the inspired silence. We’re all famous in our own hearts anyway.
Simon Van Booy (The Illusion of Separateness)
Zachary notified the local newspapers and all pertinent radio and television stations. He called a press conference at the home of his client, Jennifer Tracey, to announce the filing of a major multimillion-dollar lawsuit against a major religious institution. The dye had been cast. A long, tough road lay ahead. For Zachary, Jennifer, Kenny, and Jake, there was no turning back.
Mark M. Bello (Betrayal of Faith (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #1))
of her favorites was John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”: . . . all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. Kya recalled a poem written by a lesser-known poet, Amanda Hamilton, published recently in the local newspaper she’d bought at the Piggly Wiggly: Trapped inside, Love is a caged beast, Eating its own flesh. Love must be free to wander, To land upon its chosen shore And breathe.
Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing)
Here’s the simplest, most jargon-free, definition of marketing you’re ever likely to come across: If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Coming to the Showground Saturday,” that’s advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed and the local newspaper writes a story about it, that’s publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations. If the town’s citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that’s sales. And if you planned the whole thing, that’s marketing.
Allan Dib (The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd)
Simply calling the Great Fire an accident did not satisfy some people, most notably the local newspapers. They demanded a culprit--
Jim Murphy (The Great Fire)
What great advice,” she said. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. You should start a Dear Dante column in the local newspaper.
Ana Huang (King of Wrath (Kings of Sin #1))
as for swearing that nobody told the girls radium wouldn’t hurt them—unfortunately for the company, a full-page ad signed by its president and printed in several editions of the local newspaper asserted exactly that.
Kate Moore (The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women)
What a remarkable phenomenon,” said the Professor of Ornithology as he was passing over the bridge. “A swallow in winter!” And he wrote a long letter about it to the local newspaper. Every one quoted it, it was  full of so many words that they could not understand.
Oscar Wilde (Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated))
If there were a Pulitzer for bleak irony, however, it would go to the News for its Saturday-morning report on one of the most important local stories of the year—the Galveston count of the 1900 U.S. census, which the newspaper had first announced on Friday. The news was excellent: Over the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city’s population had increased by 29.93 percent, the highest growth rate of any southern city counted so far.
Erik Larson (Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History)
...while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, undercover as a New Age mountebank, Karadžić frequented a bar called Mad House - Luda kuća. Mad House offered weekly gusle-accompanied performances of Serbian epic poetry; wartime pictures of him and General Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serbs' military leader (now on trial in The Hague), proudly hung on the walls. A local newspaper claimed that, on at least one occasion, Karadžić performed an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, undertaking feats of extermination. Consider the horrible postmodernism of the situation: an undercover war criminal narrating his own crimes in decasyllabic verse, erasing his personality so that he could assert it more forcefully and heroically.
Aleksandar Hemon (The Book of My Lives)
Each year, the city government, the police department and the local newspapers warned adult Amsterdammers to take precautions. Before going to bed the night before Luilak, adults were advised to: disconnect their doorbells, bring garbage cans indoors, close all windows, avoid sleeping in street-facing rooms and wear earplugs.
Pete Jordan (In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist)
A sponsoring pastor in Minnesota told a local newspaper, “It would be wicked to just bring them over and feed and clothe them and let them go to hell. The God who made us wants them to be converted. If anyone thinks that a gospel-preaching church would bring them over and not tell them about the Lord, they’re out of their mind.
Anne Fadiman (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures)
A terrifying affliction had infested America’s small towns and suburbs: the school shooter. We knew it because we had seen it on TV. We had read about it in the newspapers. It had materialized inexplicably two years before. In February 1997, a sixteen-year-old in remote Bethel, Alaska, brought a shotgun to high school and opened fire. He killed the principal and a student and injured two others. In October, another boy shot up his school, this time in Pearl, Mississippi. Two dead students, seven wounded. Two more sprees erupted in December, in remote locales: West Paducah, Kentucky, and Stamps, Arkansas. Seven were dead by the end of the year, sixteen wounded.
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
Microphones made me feel as if I were speaking to the whole world. I had talked to only local TV stations and newspapers, but, still, I felt as if the wind would carry my words, the same way it scatters flower pollen in the spring, planting seeds all over the earth.
Malala Yousafzai (I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World)
the newspaper is the Christian’s report card. By reading the local news we can tell what kind of job we are doing as intercessors. I often encourage people to “pray the news.
Cindy Jacobs (Possessing the Gates of the Enemy: A Training Manual for Militant Intercession)
The newspaper ties a region together, helps it make sense of itself, fosters a sense of community, serves as a village square whose boundaries transcend Facebook’s filter bubble.
Margaret Sullivan (Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy)
Without local newspapers there’s no one to tell you when somebody’s been fined for having rats in their kitchens.
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island)
He announced his intentions to build a spaceport by walking into the office of a local newspaper, the Van Horn Advocate, and giving an impromptu interview to its bewildered editor.
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
The local newspaper got wind of it and published an article titled “Born to Be Mild” in the Sunday Lifestyle section, with a big photo of us.
Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You)
I like the local newspapers best – where the rest of the world doesn’t exist,
Marianne Cronin (The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot)
I had worked for a newspaper of sorts, word got around, and I became editor of our local school newspaper, The Drum. I don't recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed. My second-in-command, Danny Emond, had even less interest in the paper than I did. Danny just liked the idea that Room 4, where we did our work, was near the girls' bathroom. "Someday I'll just go crazy and hack my way in there, Steve," he told me on more than one occasion. "Hack, hack, hack." Once he added, perhaps in an effort to justify himself: "The prettiest girls in school pull up their skirts in there." This struck me as so fundamentally stupid it might actually be wise, like a Zen Koan or an early story by John Updike.
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things? You may have causes, goals, interests. Are they even worth pursuing? I've long held on to a clipping from a newspaper in Roanoke, Virginia. It featured a photo of a pregnant woman who had lodged a protest against a local construction site. She worried that the sound of jackhammers was injuring her unborn child. But get this: In the photo, the woman is holding a cigarette. If she cared about her unborn child, the time she spent railing against jackhammers would have been better spent putting out that cigarette.
Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
We were three hours from Chicago, so my blackness was less of a curiosity, more of a threat. And there were the black students on campus, the nerve of them, daring to pursue higher education. In the local newspaper, residents wrote angry letters about a new criminal element--the scourge of youthful black ambition, black joy. In my more generous moments, I tried to believe the locals were using anger to mask their fear of living in a dying town in a changing world.
Roxane Gay (Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body)
Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, “You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn.” Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and glancing over it, said, in a colder voice: “Are you pleased with Kent?
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
Since 2008, 150 local papers have closed in England, including some once major ones like the Surrey Herald and Reading Post. That’s not good. Without local newspapers there’s no one to tell you when somebody’s been fined for having rats in their kitchens.
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island)
Our local newspaper neglected to run an article on the suicide attempt, because the editor, Mr. Baubee, felt such depressing information wouldn’t fit between the front-page article on the Junior League Flower Show and the back-page photographs of grinning brides.
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
We had a bad summer here, my friend. Local folks keep it as quiet as they can—even the newspaper doesn’t play it up—but there was some nasty work. Murders. Half a dozen at least. Kids. Found one down in the Barrens just recently. Patrick Hockstetter, his name was. All decayed.
Stephen King (11/22/63)
In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet’s statistics. In search of data on the letters’ relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E’s, nine thousand T’s, and only two hundred Z’s. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text.
James Gleick (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood)
The day after Congress declared war, the Socialist party met in emergency convention in St. Louis and called the declaration “a crime against the people of the United States.” In the summer of 1917, Socialist antiwar meetings in Minnesota drew large crowds—five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand farmers—protesting the war, the draft, profiteering. A local newspaper in Wisconsin, the Plymouth Review, said that probably no party ever gained more rapidly in strength than the Socialist party just at the present time.” It reported that “thousands assemble to hear Socialist speakers in places where ordinarily a few hundred are considered large assemblages.” The Akron Beacon-Journal, a conservative newspaper in Ohio, said there was “scarcely a political observer . . . but what will admit that were an election to come now a mighty tide of socialism would inundate the Middle West.” It said the country had “never embarked upon a more unpopular war.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
The morning grass was damp and cool with dew. My yellow rain slicker must have looked sharp contrasted against the bright green that spring provided. I must have looked like an early nineteenth century romantic poet (Walt Whitman, perhaps?) lounging around a meadow celebrating nature and the glory of my existence. But don’t make this about me. Don’t you dare. This was about something bigger than me (by at least 44 feet). I was there to unselfishly throw myself in front of danger (nothing is scarier than a parked bulldozer), in the hopes of saving a tree, and also procuring a spot in a featured article in my local newspaper. It’s not about celebrity for me, it’s about showing that I care. It’s not enough to just quietly go about caring anymore. No, now we need the world to see that we care. I was just trying to do my part to show I was doing my part. But no journalists or TV news stations came to witness my selfless heroics. In fact, nobody came at all, not even Satan’s henchmen (the construction crew). People might scoff and say, “But it was Sunday.” Yes, it was Sunday. But if you’re a hero you can’t take a day off. I’d rather be brave a day early than a day late. Most cowards show up late to their destiny. But I always show up early, and quite often I leave early too, but at least I have the guts to lay down my life for something I’d die for. Now I only laid down my life for a short fifteen-minute nap, but I can forever hold my chin high as I loudly tell anyone who will listen to my exploits as an unsung hero (not that I haven’t written dozens of songs dedicated to my bravery). Most superheroes hide anonymously behind masks. That’s cowardly to me. I don’t wear a mask. And the only reason I’m anonymous is that journalists don’t respond to my requests for interviews, and when I hold press conferences nobody shows up, not even my own mother. The world doesn’t know all the good I’ve done for the world. And that’s fine with me. Not really. But if I have to go on being anonymous to make this world a better place, I will. But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about changing my hours of altruism from 7-8 am Sunday mornings to 9-5 am Monday through Friday, and only doing deeds of greatness in crowded locations.
Jarod Kintz (Gosh, I probably shouldn't publish this.)
What can I do? I have no talents. I refuse to cripple myself for ninety roubles... Well, all right, so I'll eat two thousand hamburgers in my lifetime. Wear out twenty-five dark-grey suits. Leaf through seven hundred issues of the local newspaper. And die without scratching the earth's surface. Is that it? ... I'd rather live only a minute, but live it right! (Fred Kolesnikov)
Sergei Dovlatov
In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet’s statistics. In search of data on the letters’ relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases.
James Gleick (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood)
In 1960, The New York Times printed an advertisement titled “Heed Their Rising Voices” that attempted to raise money to defend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. against perjury charges in Alabama. Southern officials responded by going on the offensive and suing the newspaper. Public Safety Commissioner L. B. Sullivan and Governor Patterson claimed defamation. A local jury awarded them half a million dollars, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice—that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism.
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
What Is Marketing? Some people think marketing is advertising or branding or some other vague concept. While all these are associated with marketing, they are not one and the same. Here’s the simplest, most jargon-free definition of marketing you’re ever likely to come across: If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Coming to the Showground Saturday,” that’s advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed and the local newspaper writes a story about it, that’s publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations. If the town’s citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and, ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that’s sales. And if you planned the whole thing, that’s marketing.
Allan Dib (The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd)
Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (1912–67) was born in Okemah, a small town in Oklahoma, and was named for the Democratic presidential candidate by his father, a businessman involved in real estate, newspaper writing, and local and state politics.
Richard Kurin (The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects)
But he forgot to close a lock one night, and as a newspaper reported, “the negroes rose and cut the throat of Mr. Speers, and of another man who accompanied him.” Ten slaves were killed in the course of local authorities’ attempts to recapture them.
Edward E. Baptist (The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism)
Back in the time before Columbus, there were only Indians here, no skyscrapers, no automobiles, no streets. Of course, we didn't use the words Indian or Native American then; we were just people. We didn't know we were supposedly drunks or lazy or savages. I wondered what it was like to live without that weight on your shoulders, the weight of the murdered ancestors, the stolen land, the abused children, the burden every Native person carries. We were told in movies and books that Indians had a sacred relationship with the land, that we worshipped and nurtured it. But staring at Nathan, I didn't feel any mystical bond with the rez. I hated our shitty unpaved roads and our falling-down houses and the snarling packs of dogs that roamed freely in the streets and alleys. But most of all, I hated that kids like Nathan - good kids, decent kids - got involved with drugs and crime and gangs, because there was nothing for them to do here. No after-school jobs, no clubs, no tennis lessons. Every month in the Lakota Times newspaper there was an obituary for another teen suicide, another family in the Burned Thigh Nation who'd had their heart taken away from them. In the old days, the eyapaha was the town crier, the person who would meet incoming warriors after a battle, ask them what happened so they wouldn't have to speak of their own glories, then tell the people the news. Now the eyapaha, our local newspaper, announced losses and harms too often, victories and triumphs too rarely.
David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Winter Counts)
waited, I read that morning’s out-of-date newspaper. Paul the Porter sometimes leaves them for me on my bedside cabinet. I like the local newspapers best—where the rest of the world doesn’t exist, and all that matters is the local primary school’s new nature garden and an old woman who knitted a quilt for charity. Children are turning one year older, teenagers are graduating, and grandparents are being laid to rest. Everything is small and manageable and everybody waits their turn to die. When I’d finished
Marianne Cronin (The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot)
In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man. As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast of a great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousand of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed. Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could possibly approve.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)
We have treaties with some vampire tribes. And we also have several more departments, at the academy and at the college. And in the League at large as well. Things like Tech and Supernatural Studies." "What about Vampire Relations?" I asked. Especially with the local newspapers now reporting on the increase in missing persons. Apparently the last time something like this happened was in the eighties. "We need that. I could totally do that." "Making out with your hot boyfriend doesn't count toward your grade," Jenna teased. I shook my head. "I knew this place was all wrong.
Alyxandra Harvey (Blood Moon (Drake Chronicles, #5))
What Is Marketing? Some people think marketing is advertising or branding or some other vague concept. While all these are associated with marketing, they are not one and the same. Here’s the simplest, most jargon-free definition of marketing you’re ever likely to come across: If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Coming to the Showground Saturday,” that’s advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed and the local newspaper writes a story about it, that’s publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations. If the town’s citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and, ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that’s sales. And if you planned the whole thing, that’s marketing. Yup, it’s as simple as that—marketing is the strategy you use for getting your ideal target market to know you, like you and trust you enough to become a customer. All the stuff you usually associate with marketing are tactics.
Allan Dib (The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd)
Recent research has shown that traffickers are no longer just kidnapping individuals off of the street, but they are now employing new tactics to find their potential victims.Traffickers are placing ads in newspapers, online forums, local poster boards, and even soliciting young people on school campuses.
Asa Don Brown
Relatively few people in town were paying close attention to the issue; a much bigger controversy in the local papers during that long, hot summer was whether flying the United Nations flag at town hall was a gesture of international cooperation or “evidence of communist conspiracy,” as one newspaper article put it.16
Dan Fagin (Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation)
I bought a morning newspaper and found my way into a café. It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with local papers. Personally I can think of nothing more exciting—certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee—than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about.
Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
I wished Adam weren’t jumping in for his turn. Because watching Adam wakeboard was not relaxing. He wasn’t careful when wakeboarding. Or in general. He was the opposite of careful. His life was one big episode of Jackass. He would do anything on a dare, so the older boys dared him a lot. My role in this game was to run and tell their mom. If I’d been able to run faster when we were kids, I might have saved Adam from a broken arm, several cracked ribs, and a couple of snake bites. Knowing this, it might not make a lot of sense that Mr. Vader let us wakeboard for the marina. But we’d come to wakeboarding only gradually. When we first started out, it was more like, Look at the very young children on water skis! How adorable. One time the local newspaper ran a photo of me and Adam waterskiing double, each of us holding up an American flag. It’s okay for you to gag now. I can take it. But Mr. Vader was no fool. He understood things changed. After the second time Adam broke his collarbone, Mr. Vader put us under strict orders not to get hurt, because it was bad for business. Customers might not be so eager to buy a wakeboard and all the equipment if they witnessed our watery death. To enforce this rule, the punishment for bleeding in the boat was that we had to clean the boat. Adam cleaned the boat a lot last summer.
Jennifer Echols (Endless Summer (The Boys Next Door, #1-2))
I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting. In the case of the orchid story I was interested to see the words 'swamp' and 'orchids' and 'Seminoles' and 'cloning' and 'criminal' together in one short piece. Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can't believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water.
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
He shucked his shorts, grabbed the newspaper off the nightstand, and plodded to the bathroom to take care of his business. Ensconced on the toilet, waiting for the semi-liquid gush that always came six hours or so after he ate Mexican food (would he never learn?), he opened the Call and rattled his way to the comics, the only part of the local paper that was worth a damn.
Stephen King (The Outsider)
But Jones knew the day of reckoning in Springfield had to come. “Mr. Lincoln,” he finally asked one day, “will you have the kindness to tell me what you think of the result thus far?” Setting down his omnipresent pencil and paper, Lincoln walked over and “examined it very closely for some time,” and finally, to the artist’s delight, exclaimed, in quaint Western style: “I think it looks very much like the critter.”43 The local newspaper agreed, predicting that though the bust would “yet require a number of ‘sittings’ more to complete the work…the artist has already so well succeeded in impressing the clay with the life and noble characteristics of his subject, that we hesitate not to pronounce it the best likeness of the President elect we have seen.
Harold Holzer (Lincoln President-Elect : Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860-1861)
When Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works placed enslaved Blacks in skilled positions to cut labor costs, White workers protested. In the only protracted urban industrial strike in the pre–Civil War South, they demanded pay raises and the removal of “the negroes” from skilled work. If the striking ironworkers thought enslavers really cared more about racism than profit, or that they would not abandon, out of self-interest, their promotions of a unified White masculinity, then they were in for a long and tortured lesson about power and profit and propaganda. Richmond elites banded together. They viewed the anti-Black strikers as being equivalent to abolitionists because they were trying to prevent them “from making use of slave labor,” as the local newspaper cried. In the end, the White strikers were fired.22
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering ... an iron curtain between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, Totalitarian Propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientist will call 'the problem of happiness' - in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude ... The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies.
Aldous Huxley
Because no one of us lives for himself and no one dies for himself. For if we live, then we live for the Lord; and if we die, then we die for the Lord. Therefore whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.' Pastor Jón Prímus to himself: That's rather good. With that he thrust the manual into his cassock pocket, turned towards the coffin, and said: That was the formula, Mundi. I was trying to get you to understand it, but it didn't work out; actually it did not matter. We cannot get round this formula anyway. It's easy to prove that the formula is wrong, but it is at least so right that the world came into existence. But it is a waste of words to try to impute to the Creator democratic ideas or social virtues; or to think that one can move Him with weeping and wailing, and persuade Him with logic and legal quibbles. Nothing is so pointless as words. The late pastor Jens of Setberg knew all this and more besides. But he also knew that the formula is kept in a locker. The rest comes by itself. The Creation, which includes you and me, we are in the formula, this very formula I have just been reading; and there is no way out of it. Because no one lives for himself and so on; and whether we live or die, we and so on. You are annoyed that demons should govern the world and that consequently there is only one virtue that is taken seriously by the newspapers: killings. You said they had discovered a machine to destroy everything that draws breath on earth; they were now trying to agree on a method of accomplishing this task quickly and cleanly; preferably while having a cocktail. They are trying to break out of the formula, poor wretches. Who can blame them for that? Who has never wanted to do that? Many consider the human being to be the most useless animal on earth or even the lowest stage of evolution in all the universe put together, and that it is more than high time to wipe this creature out, like the mammoth in the tundras. We once knew a war maiden, you and I. There was only one word ever found for her: Úa. So wonderful was this creation that it's no exaggeration to say that she was completely unbearable; indeed I think that we two helped one another to destroy her, and yet perhaps she is still alive. There was never anything like her. ... In conclusion I, as the local pastor, thank you for having participated in carrying the Creation on your shoulders alongside me.
Halldór Laxness (Under the Glacier)
The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the reestablishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response. And in today’s world, that means recognizing that it’s impossible to have a well-informed citizenry without having a well-connected citizenry. While education remains important, it is now connection that is the key. A well-connected citizenry is made up of men and women who discuss and debate ideas and issues among themselves and who constantly test the validity of the information and impressions they receive from one another—as well as the ones they receive from their government. No citizenry can be well informed without a constant flow of honest information about contemporary events and without a full opportunity to participate in a discussion of the choices that the society must make. Moreover, if citizens feel deprived of a meaningful opportunity to participate in the national conversation, they can scarcely be blamed for developing a lack of interest in the process. And sure enough, numerous surveys and studies have documented the erosion of public knowledge of basic facts about our democracy. For example, from the data compiled by the National Election Studies on one recent election, only 15 percent of respondents could recall the name of even one of the candidates in the election in their district. Less than 4 percent could name two candidates. When there are so few competitive races, it’s hard to blame them. Two professors, James Snyder and David Stromberg, found that knowledge of candidates increased in media markets where the local newspaper covered the congressional representative more. Very few respondents claimed to learn anything at all about their congressional elections from television news.
Al Gore (The Assault on Reason)
News never changes much. It’s just the same things happening to different people. I would rather experience things happening to me than read about them happening to others. I am my own newspaper and my own radio. I honestly don’t believe that man was meant to know everything going on in the world, all at the same time. A man turns on the TV and all those commentators bombard him with the local, the national and the international news. The newspapers do the same thing, and the poor guy with all the immediate problems of his own life is burdened with those of the whole world.
Sam Kieth (One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey)
Every few decades a newspaper report about embezzlement or physical abuse at the school initiated an investigation by the state. In their wake came prohibitions against 'spanking,' and the use of dark cells and sweatboxes. The administration instituted a stricter accounting of school supplies, which had a tendency to disappear. The parole of students to local families and businesses was terminated and the medical staff increased... It had been years since there were any allegations against Nickel. On this occasion the school was merely another item on a long list of government facilities due a once-over.
Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys)
Then, in January 1961, a religious riot broke out in the central Indian city of Jabalpur. A Hindu girl had committed suicide; it was alleged that she took her life because she had been assaulted by two Muslim men. The claim was given lurid publicity by a local Jana Sangh newspaper, whereupon Hindu students went on a rampage through the town, attacking Muslim homes and burning shops. In retaliation a Muslim group torched a Hindu neighbourhood. The rioting continued for days, spreading also to the countryside. It was the most serious such incident since Partition, its main sufferers being poor Muslims, mostly weavers and bidi (cigarette) workers.52
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
yoga on the mountainside and then fall asleep in the meadow. Read a newspaper on the porch, and feel the cold pump water wash away the ink on your grubby hands afterward. Listen to one of Andy’s old records while you eat lunch and notice how you start chewing in rhythm. Go to town and ask for a map of the local stores and restaurants. Read a book even if it’s not what you would prefer, just to see what another genre is like. Take off your shoes and get your feet muddy down by where the frogs live. Wander around the neighborhood looking for someone to talk to. Write things down, with a nice pen, on scrap paper, and stuff the bits of ideas in your pockets so you’ll meet them again at the end of the day.
Kelly Harms (The Bright Side of Going Dark)
They write the steady stream of editorials that appear in local and national newspapers to reinforce the hackneyed orthodoxies of the pharmaceutical paradigms—“all vaccines are safe and effective,” etc. They root out heresy by sitting on the state medical boards—the “Inquisition” courts—that censure and de-license dissident doctors. They control the medical journals and peer-review journal literature to fortify Pharma’s agenda. They teach on medical school faculties, populate journal editorial boards, and chair university departments. They supervise hospitals and chair hospital departments. They act as expert witnesses for pharmaceutical companies in civil court and the federal vaccine court. They present awards to one another.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
The kid in the newspaper was named Stevie, and he was eight. I was thirty-nine and lived by myself in a house that I owned. For a short time our local newspaper featured an orphan every week. Later they would transition to adoptable pets, but for a while it was orphans, children your could foster and possibly adopt of everything worked out, the profiles were short, maybe two or three hundred words. This was what I knew: Stevie liked going to school. He made friends easily. He promised he would make his bed every morning. He hoped that if he were very good we could have his own dog, and if he were very, very good, his younger brother could be adopted with him. Stevie was Black. I knew nothing else. The picture of him was a little bigger than a postage stamp. He smiled. I studied his face at my breakfast table until something in me snapped. I paced around my house, carrying the folded newspaper. I had two bedrooms. I had a dog. I had so much more than plenty. In return he would make his bed, try his best in school. That was all he had to bargain with: himself. By the time Karl came for dinner after work I was nearly out of my mind. “I want to adopt him,” I said. Karl read the profile. He looked at the picture. “You want to be his mother?” “It’s not about being his mother. I mean, sure, if I’m his mother that’s fine, but it’s like seeing a kid waving from the window of a burning house, saying he’ll make his bed if someone will come and get him out. I can’t leave him there.” “We can do this,” Karl said. We can do this. I started to calm myself because Karl was calm. He was good at making things happen. I didn’t have to want children in order to want Stevie. In the morning I called the number in the newspaper. They took down my name and address. They told me they would send the preliminary paperwork. After the paperwork was reviewed, there would be a series of interviews and home visits. “When do I meet Stevie?” I asked. “Stevie?” “The boy in the newspaper.” I had already told her the reason I was calling. “Oh, it’s not like that,” the woman said. “It’s a very long process. We put you together with the child who will be your best match.” “So where’s Stevie?” She said she wasn’t sure. She thought that maybe someone had adopted him. It was a bait and switch, a well-written story: the bed, the dog, the brother. They knew how to bang on the floor to bring people like me out of the woodwork, people who said they would never come. I wrapped up the conversation. I didn’t want a child, I wanted Stevie. It all came down to a single flooding moment of clarity: he wouldn’t live with me, but I could now imagine that he was in a solid house with people who loved him. I put him in the safest chamber of my heart, he and his twin brother in twin beds, the dog asleep in Stevie’s arms. And there they stayed, going with me everywhere until I finally wrote a novel about them called Run. Not because I thought it would find them, but because they had become too much for me to carry. I had to write about them so that I could put them down.
Ann Patchett (These Precious Days: Essays)
blackout one New York newspaper managed to appear: The New York Times. It had shifted its printing operations immediately across the Hudson to Newark, New Jersey, where the power plants were functioning and where a local paper, The Newark Evening News, had a substantial printing plant. But instead of the million copies the Times management had ordered, fewer than half this number actually reached the readers. Just as the Times went to press (so at least goes a widely told anecdote) the executive editor and three of his assistants started arguing how to hyphenate one word. This took them forty-eight minutes (so it is said)—or half of the available press time. The Times, the editor argued, sets a standard for written English in the United States and therefore cannot afford a grammatical mistake.
Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
There are very few SJWs who would be willing to give up indoor plumbing or their iPhones for their ideals. The fact that they cannot see the contradiction now does not mean they will always be unable to do so, particularly given the way in which their corrupted institutions are falling into rapid decline, one after the other, and being replaced by radical new institutions. The public schools can no longer educate, so people are turning to homeschooling. The universities can no longer provide liberal arts educations, so people are becoming technology-assisted autodidacts. The banks no longer loan, the state and local governments no longer provide basic public services, the military does not defend the borders, the newspapers no longer provide news, the television networks no longer entertain, and the corporations are increasingly unable to provide employment.
Vox Day (SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 1))
The snuffies’ stories were regularly handed out to civilian correspondents, who sometimes reshaped them and put them on the wire, which meant they sometimes showed up in little newspapers throughout the United States. Mention a marine’s hometown—something Berntson was always careful to do—and there was a good chance it would end up in his local paper. There were usually no bylines on these stories, but the marines remembered who wrote them. Berntson would be hailed by a grunt in the bush who said, in so many words: Hey, Storyteller, you lying sack of shit. You know all that bullshit you wrote about me? You know what? My mom clipped it and sent it to me! They think I’m a hero at home now and maybe they’ll buy me a beer when I get back! That felt better than a byline. Commanders heading off on a hairy patrol would say, “Get Storyteller. We’re going out on a romp.
Mark Bowden (Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam)
I am an urchin, standing in the cold, elbowed aside by the glossy rich visitors in their fur coats and ostentatious jewellery, being fussed into the hotel by pompous-looking doormen. 'No problem. I'd better get home, actually Mr – Gustav. A drink is very tempting, but maybe not such a good idea after all.' I pat my pockets. 'And I'm skint.' 'Pavements not paved with gold yet, eh?' He moves on along the facade of the grand hotel to the corner, and waits. He's staring not back at me but down St James Street. I wage a little war with myself. He's a stranger, remember. The newspaper headlines, exaggerated by the time they reach the office of Jake's local rag: Country girl from the sticks raped and murdered in London by suave conman. Even Poppy would be wagging her metaphorical finger at me by now. Blaming herself for not being there, looking out for me. But we're out in public here. Lots of people around us. He's charming. He's incredibly attractive. He's got a lovely deep, well spoken voice. And he's an entrepreneur who must be bloody rich if he owns more than one house. What the hell else am I going to do with myself when everyone else is out having fun? One thing I won't tell him is that my pockets might be empty, but my bank account is full. 'One drink. Then I must get back.' He doesn't answer or protest, but with a courtly bow he crooks his elbow and escorts me down St James. We turn right and into the far more subtle splendour of Dukes Hotel. 'Dress code?' I ask nervously, wiping my feet obediently on the huge but welcoming doormat and drifting ahead of him into the smart interior where domed and glassed corridors lead here and there. The foyer smells of mulled wine and candles and entices you to succumb to its perfumed embrace.
Primula Bond
Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!
Kwame Nkrumah
The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police. When a person fell sick, the family took care of her. When a person grew old, the family supported her, and her children were her pension fund. When a person died, the family took care of the orphans. If a person wanted to build a hut, the family lent a hand. If a person wanted to open a business, the family raised the necessary money. If a person wanted to marry, the family chose, or at least vetted, the prospective spouse. If conflict arose with a neighbour, the family muscled in. But if a person’s illness was too grave for the family to manage, or a new business demanded too large an investment, or the neighbourhood quarrel escalated to the point of violence, the local community came to the rescue.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
On the rare occasions when a reporter asks if a criminal is an immigrant, government officials summarily dismiss the question as if it would be racist to discuss the defendant’s nation of birth. Ricardo DeLeon Flores killed a teenaged girl in Kansas after speeding through a stop sign and crashing into two cars. “When asked whether Flores was a U.S. citizen,” the local Kansas newspaper reported, “Deborah Owens of the Leavenworth County Attorney’s Office said she had no knowledge of his citizenship status.”33 Was the Spanish translator a hint? The ICE officials showing up in court? His Oakland Raiders T-shirt? Two families’ lives were forever changed by the reckless behavior of someone who should not have been in this country, but the prosecutor refused to tell a reporter that Flores was an illegal immigrant. Owens must have felt a warm rush of self-righteousness, thinking how much better she is than all those blood-and-soil types who want to know when foreigners kill Americans.
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
New Orleans at the nexus of gold rush, immigration, war, and trade created a fertile playground for a variety of "mysterious affections" between men. What Whitman would later call "adhesiveness" — his term for male-male love borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology — was on full display in the Crescent City. Prior to the existence of a modern concept of homosexuality (as sexual orientation), hand-holding, embracing, or sharing a bed were broadly considered appropriate expressions of bonding between members of the same sex. A city like New Orleans, overrun with transitory young men of marriageable age without local family ties, invited further experimentation. When Whitman was pressed, late in life, about his sexual history in New Orleans, he became flustered, quickly making up stories about affairs with women and having fathered numerous illegitimate children. The vehemence of his old-age denials suggests both an awareness of the growing homophobia of the 1890s and a conscious desire to rewrite this particular part of his biography.
Walt Whitman (Walt Whitman's New Orleans: Sidewalk Sketches and Newspaper Rambles)
New Orleans at the nexus of gold rush, immigration, war, and trade created a fertile playground for a variety of :mysterious affections" between men. What Whitman would later call "adhesiveness" — his term for male-male love borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology — was on full display in the Crescent City. Prior to the existence of a modern concept of homosexuality (as sexual orientation), hand-holding, embracing, or sharing a bed were broadly considered appropriate expressions of bonding between members of the same sex. A city like New Orleans, overrun with transitory young men of marriageable age without local family ties, invited further experimentation. When Whitman was pressed, late in life, about his sexual history in New Orleans, he became flustered, quickly making up stories about affairs with women and having fathered numerous illegitimate children. The vehemence of his old-age denials suggests both an awareness of the growing homophobia of the 1890s and a conscious desire to rewrite this particular part of his biography.
Walt Whitman (Walt Whitman's New Orleans: Sidewalk Sketches and Newspaper Rambles)
Newspapers back then still wielded a powerful influence over public opinion, especially their editorial and op-ed pages. I looked up the fifty top newspapers in the United States. Our ten consulates covered the areas in which they were published and distributed. If each consulate submitted an op-ed article to their local papers every few months, we could produce a critical mass of op-eds to influence the senators, members of Congress and other decision makers who read those pages. I set up a small cottage industry in the embassy to prepare and distribute the op-eds. Sharply crafted by writers I recruited, they were signed by Israel’s consuls. I allowed the consuls to insert changes to suit their particular audiences. If they submitted good op-eds on their own, I encouraged that, too. Soon we blanketed the key opinion markets of the United States with a steady stream of pro-Israeli op-eds debunking the vilifications leveled against us. Nothing on this scale had been done in America since my father published his ads during World War II. We started hearing the arguments and ideas we were seeding in print on television. When others repeat your ideas as their own, you are getting traction.
Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
At this crisis certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple manufactures of the north, which, greatly reducing the number of hands necessary to be employed, threw thousands out of work, and left them without legitimate means of sustaining life. A bad harvest supervened. Distress reached its climax. Endurance, overgoaded, stretched the hand of fraternity to sedition. The throes of a sort of moral earthquake were felt heaving under the hills of the northern counties. But, as is usual in such cases, nobody took much notice. When a food-riot broke out in a manufacturing town, when a gig-mill was burnt to the ground, or a manufacturer’s house was attacked, the furniture thrown into the streets, and the family forced to flee for their lives, some local measures were or were not taken by the local magistracy. A ringleader was detected, or more frequently suffered to elude detection; newspaper paragraphs were written on the subject, and there the thing stopped. As to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labour, and who had lost that inheritance — who could not get work, and consequently could not get wages, and consequently could not get bread — they were left to suffer on, perhaps inevitably left. It
Charlotte Brontë (The Brontës Complete Works)
Early on it is clear that Addie has a rebellious streak, joining the library group and running away to Rockport Lodge. Is Addie right to disobey her parents? Where does she get her courage? 2. Addie’s mother refuses to see Celia’s death as anything but an accident, and Addie comments that “whenever I heard my mother’s version of what happened, I felt sick to my stomach.” Did Celia commit suicide? How might the guilt that Addie feels differ from the guilt her mother feels? 3. When Addie tries on pants for the first time, she feels emotionally as well as physically liberated, and confesses that she would like to go to college (page 108). How does the social significance of clothing and hairstyle differ for Addie, Gussie, and Filomena in the book? 4. Diamant fills her narrative with a number of historical events and figures, from the psychological effects of World War I and the pandemic outbreak of influenza in 1918 to child labor laws to the cultural impact of Betty Friedan. How do real-life people and events affect how we read Addie’s fictional story? 5. Gussie is one of the most forward-thinking characters in the novel; however, despite her law degree she has trouble finding a job as an attorney because “no one would hire a lady lawyer.” What other limitations do Addie and her friends face in the workforce? What limitations do women and minorities face today? 6. After distancing herself from Ernie when he suffers a nervous episode brought on by combat stress, Addie sees a community of war veterans come forward to assist him (page 155). What does the remorse that Addie later feels suggest about the challenges American soldiers face as they reintegrate into society? Do you think soldiers today face similar challenges? 7. Addie notices that the Rockport locals seem related to one another, and the cook Mrs. Morse confides in her sister that, although she is usually suspicious of immigrant boarders, “some of them are nicer than Americans.” How does tolerance of the immigrant population vary between city and town in the novel? For whom might Mrs. Morse reserve the term Americans? 8. Addie is initially drawn to Tessa Thorndike because she is a Boston Brahmin who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her own class on the women’s page of the newspaper. What strengths and weaknesses does Tessa’s character represent for educated women of the time? How does Addie’s description of Tessa bring her reliability into question? 9. Addie’s parents frequently admonish her for being ungrateful, but Addie feels she has earned her freedom to move into a boardinghouse when her parents move to Roxbury, in part because she contributed to the family income (page 185). How does the Baum family’s move to Roxbury show the ways Betty and Addie think differently from their parents about household roles? Why does their father take such offense at Herman Levine’s offer to house the family? 10. The last meaningful conversation between Addie and her mother turns out to be an apology her mother meant for Celia, and for a moment during her mother’s funeral Addie thinks, “She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.” Does Addie find any closure from her mother’s death? 11. Filomena draws a distinction between love and marriage when she spends time catching up with Addie before her wedding, but Addie disagrees with the assertion that “you only get one great love in a lifetime.” In what ways do the different romantic experiences of each woman inform the ideas each has about love? 12. Filomena and Addie share a deep friendship. Addie tells Ada that “sometimes friends grow apart. . . . But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there.” What qualities do you think friends must share in order to have that kind of connection? Discuss your relationship with a best friend. Enhance
Anita Diamant (The Boston Girl)
I thought about the aftermath of the 1862 war, when thirty-eight hastily condemned warriors had been hung in Mankato, in the country's largest-ever mass execution. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves and then dug up for study by local doctors, including Dr. Mayo, who kept the body of Cut Nose for his personal examination. I thought about my father losing his teaching job, about his struggle with depression and drinking. About how angry he was that our history was not taught in schools. Instead, we had to battle sports mascots and stereotypes. Movie actors in brownface. Tourists with cameras. Welfare lines. Alcoholism. 'After stealing everything,' he would rage, 'now they want to blame us for it, too.' Social services broke up Native families, sending children like me to white foster parents. Every week, the newspapers ran stories about Indians who rolled their cars while drunk or the rise of crack cocaine on the reservations or somebody's arrest for gang-related crimes. No wonder so many Native kids were committing suicide. But there was so much more to the story of the run. What people didn't see because they chose never to look. Unlike the stone monument in New Ulm, built to memorialize the settlers' loss with angry pride, the Dakhota had created a living, breathing memorial that found healing in prayer and ceremony. What the two monuments shared, however, was remembering. We were all trying to find a way through grief.
Diane Wilson (The Seed Keeper)
In October 2004, seven Milwaukee police officers sadistically beat Frank Jude Jr. outside an off-duty police party. The Journal Sentinel newspaper in Milwaukee investigated the crime and published photos of Jude taken right after the beating. The officers were convicted, and some reforms were put in place. But the city saw an unexpected side effect. Calls to 911 dropped dramatically—twenty-two thousand less than the previous year. You know what did rise? The number of homicides—eighty-seven in the six months after the photos were published, a seven-year high. That information comes from a 2016 study done by Matthew Desmond, an associate social sciences professor at Harvard University and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted. He told the Journal Sentinel that a case like Jude’s “tears the fabric apart so deeply and delegitimizes the criminal justice system in the eyes of the African-American community that they stop relying on it in significant numbers.” With shootings of unarmed civilians being captured on cell phones and shared on the internet, the distrust of the police is not relegated to that local community. The stories of the high-profile wrongful death cases of Tamir Rice in Cleveland or Eric Brown in New York spread fast across the country. We were in a worse place than we were twenty years earlier, when the vicious police officer beating of Rodney King went unpunished and Los Angeles went up in flames. It meant more and more crimes would go unsolved because the police were just not trusted. Why risk your life telling an organization about a crime when you think that members of that organization are out to get you? And how can that ever change?
Billy Jensen (Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders)
The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadistri in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation. Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He was pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved his head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expression, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course. He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play 'Giovinezza', and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.
Louis de Bernières (Corelli’s Mandolin)
Evan was attracted to technology early on, building his first computer in sixth grade and experimenting with Photoshop in the Crossroads computer lab. He would later describe the computer teacher, Dan, as his best friend. Evan dove into journalism as well, writing for the school newspaper, Crossfire. One journalism class required students to sell a certain amount of advertising for Crossfire as part of their grade. Evan walked around the neighborhood asking local businesses to buy ads; once he had exceeded his sales goals, he helped coach his peers on how to pitch businesses and ask adults for money. By high school, the group of 20 students Evan had started with in kindergarten had grown to around 120. Charming, charismatic, and smart, Evan threw parties at his dad’s house that were “notorious” in his words. Evan’s outsized personality could rub people the wrong way at times, but his energy, organizing skills, and enthusiasm made him an exceptional party thrower. He possessed a bravado that could be frustrating and off-putting but was great for convincing everyone that the night’s party was going to be the greatest of all time. Obsessed with the energy drink Red Bull and the lifestyle the brand cultivated, Evan talked his way into an internship at the company as a senior in high school. The job involved throwing parties and other events sponsored by Red Bull. Clarence Carter, the head of the company’s security team, would give Evan advice that would stand him well in the years to come: pay attention to who helps you clean up after the party. Later recalling the story, Evan said, “When everyone is tired and the night is over, who stays and helps out? Because those are your true friends. Those are the hard workers, the people that believe that working hard is the right thing to do.
Billy Gallagher (How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story)
British / Pakistani ISIS suspect, Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, is arrested in Bangladesh on suspicion of recruiting jihadists to fight in Syria • Local police named arrested Briton as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, also known as Zak, living in 70 Eversleigh Road, Westham, E6 1HQ London • They suspect him of recruiting militants for ISIS in two Bangladeshi cities • He arrived in the country in February, having previously spent time in Syria and Pakistan • Suspected militant recruiter also recently visited Australia A forty year old Muslim British man has been arrested in Bangladesh on suspicion of recruiting would-be jihadists to fight for Islamic State terrorists in Syria and Iraq. The man, who police named as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood born 24th August 1977, also known as Zak, is understood to be of Pakistani origin and was arrested near the Kamalapur Railway area of the capital city Dhaka. He is also suspected of having attempted to recruit militants in the northern city of Sylhet - where he is understood to have friends he knows from living in Newham, London - having reportedly first arrived in the country about six months ago to scout for potential extremists. Militants: The British Pakistani man (sitting on the left) named as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood was arrested in Bangladesh. The arrested man has been identified as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, sources at the media wing of Dhaka Metropolitan Police told local newspapers. He is believed to have arrived in Bangladesh in February and used social media websites including Facebook to sound out local men about their interest in joining ISIS, according Monirul Islam - joint commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police - who was speaking at a press briefing today. Zakaria has openly shared Islamist extremist materials on his Facebook and other social media links. An example of Zakaria Saqib Mahmood sharing Islamist materials on his Facebook profile He targeted Muslims from Pakistan as well as Bangladesh, Mr Islam added, before saying: 'He also went to Australia but we are yet to know the reason behind his trips'. Zakaria saqib Mahmood trip to Australia in order to recruit for militant extremist groups 'From his passport we came to know that he went to Pakistan where we believe he met a Jihadist named Rauf Salman, in addition to Australia during September last year to meet some of his links he recruited in London, mainly from his weekly charity food stand in East London, ' the DMP spokesperson went on to say. Police believes Zakaria Mahmood has met Jihadist member Rauf Salman in Pakistan Zakaria Saqib Mahmood was identified by the local police in Pakistan in the last September. The number of extremists he has met in this trip remains unknown yet. Zakaria Saqib Mahmood uses charity food stand as a cover to radicalise local people in Newham, London. Investigators: Dhaka Metropolitan Police believe Zakaria Saqib Mhamood arrived in Bangladesh in February and used social media websites including Facebook to sound out local men about their interest in joining ISIS The news comes just days after a 40-year-old East London bogus college owner called Sinclair Adamson - who also had links to the northern city of Sylhet - was arrested in Dhaka on suspicion of recruiting would-be fighters for ISIS. Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, who has studied at CASS Business School, was arrested in Dhaka on Thursday after being reported for recruiting militants. Just one day before Zakaria Mahmood's arrest, local police detained Asif Adnan, 26, and Fazle ElahiTanzil, 24, who were allegedly travelling to join ISIS militants in Syria, assisted by an unnamed Briton. It is understood the suspected would-be jihadists were planning to travel to a Turkish airport popular with tourists, before travelling by road to the Syrian border and then slipping across into the warzone.
Zakaria Zaqib Mahmood
Local Teen Adopted Finds Adoptive Family Within 24 Hours of 18th Birthday The final chapter of a family tragedy was written yesterday at the county courthouse when Cynthia and Tom Lemry signed formal adoption papers, gaining custody of Sarah Byrnes less than 24 hours before her 18th birthday. Local readers will remember Ms. Byrnes as the youngster whose face and hands were purposely burned on a hot wood stove by her father 15 years ago. The incident came to light this past February after Virgil Byrnes assaulted another teenager, 18-year-old Eric Calhoune, with a hunting knife. “Better late than never,” said Cynthia Lemry, a local high school teacher and swimming coach, in a statement to the press. “If someone had stepped up for this young lady a long time ago, years of heartache could have been avoided. She’s a remarkable human being, and we’re honored to have her in our family.” “I guess they’re just in the nick of time to pay my college tuition,” the new Sarah Lemry said with a smile. Also attending the ceremony were Eric Calhoune, the victim of Virgil Byrnes’s attack; Sandy Calhoune, the boy’s mother and a frequent columnist for this newspaper; Carver Milddleton, who served time on an assault charge against Virgil Byrnes in a related incident; the Reverend John Ellerby, controversial Episcopalian minister whose support of female clergy and full homosexual rights has frequently focused a spotlight on him in his 15-year stay at St. Mark’s; and his son, Steve Ellerby, who describes himself as “a controversial Episcopalian preacher’s kid.” Sarah Lemry confirmed that following the burning 15 years ago, her father refused her opportunities for reconstructive surgery, saying her condition would teach her to “be tough.” She refused comment on further torturous physical abuse allegations, for which, among other charges, Byrnes has been found guilty in superior court and sentenced to more than 20 years in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla. When asked if she would now seek the reconstructive surgery she was so long denied, Sarah Lemry again smiled and said, “I don’t know. It’d be a shame to change just when I’m getting used to it.
Chris Crutcher (Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes)
Once the writer was at the deathbed of a fellow writer. What interested his dying colleague more than anything else was what was being said in the cultural section of the newspapers. Did these battles of opinion take his mind off his illness by infuriating him or making him laugh? Did they put him in mind of an eternal repetition, preferable after all to what was in store for him? There was more to it than that. Even in his hopeless situation, far-removed as he was from the editorial offices, he was their prisoner; more than his nearest and dearest, the critics and editors were the object of his dreams; and in the intervals when he was free from pain, he would ask, since by then he was incapable of reading, what one publication or another had said about some new book. The intrigues, and the almost pleasurable fury they aroused in the sufferer - who saw through them - brought a kind of world, a certain permanence into the sickroom, and the man at his bedside understood his vituperating or silently nodding friend as well as if it had been his own self lying there. But later, when the end was near and the dying man still insisted on having opinions read out to him from the latest batch of newspapers, the witness vowed that he would never let things come to such a pass with him as they had with his image and likeness. Never again would he involve himself in this circuit of classifications and judgments, the substance of which was almost exclusively the playing off of one writer or school against another. Over the years since then, he had derived pride and satisfaction from staying on the outside and carrying on by his own strength rather than at the expense of rivals. The mere thought of returning to the circuit or to any of the persistently warring cliques made him feel physically ill. Of course, he would never get entirely away from them, for even today, so long after his vow, he suddenly caught sight of a word that he at first mistook for his name. But today at least he was glad - as he would not have been years ago - to have been mistaken. Lulled in security, he leafed through the local section and succeeded in giving his mind to every single news item.
Peter Handke (The Afternoon of a Writer)
Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th
Tim Wu
After scouring the local newspaper with Oliver, a worried colleague, Patrick noticed an ad for a one-bedroom in Maehringen, a small village outside town. Oliver, flipping to the next page, dismissed it immediately, claiming it the most inconvenient village by foot or bike. But that night, newspaper in hand, Patrick said he’d found just the kind of the place we’d love.
Megan Rich (Six Years of A Floating Life)
Not only are we digital immigrants, we are also media dinosaurs. We enjoy thumbing through glossy magazines, and maybe still subscribe to a daily newspaper. We schedule at least one evening per week around a favorite TV program, created by one of the major television or cable networks. We can name at least one local or national news anchor. And scattered around our homes and offices are veritable graveyards of physical media — old tapes, vinyl records, floppy disks, and magazines — that we insist on keeping, even though we'll probably never use them again.
Ian Lamont
Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and
Kent Walker (Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America (True Crime (Avon Books)))
continued for five consecutive days. And they covered everything there was to know about the former Ranger and Delta Force operator, who was dubbed “a good guy, but troubled” by unnamed former colleagues. The newspapers and local cable channels built up a picture of a veteran who was having difficulties integrating back into society. They interviewed
J.B. Turner (Hard Wired (Jon Reznick, #3))
Knowing Loshak’s preference for hard copies, Darger showered, dressed, and headed out to the local supermarket to buy a copy of the local newspaper that would be running the latest story about the Worthingtons and the memorial. Also donuts. If she was going to be up this early, then there damn well better be donuts.
L.T. Vargus (Dead End Girl (Violet Darger, #1))
Assign a file or paper tray to collect single-side printed paper for reuse. Boycott paper sourced from virgin forests and reams sold in plastic. Cancel magazine and newspaper subscriptions; view them online instead. Digitize important receipts and documents for safekeeping. Digital files are valid proofs for tax purposes. Download CutePDF Writer to save online files without having to print them. Email invitations or greeting cards instead of printing them (see “Holidays and Gifts” chapter). Forage the recycling can when paper scraps are needed, such as for bookmarks or pictures (for school collages, for example). Give extra paper to the local preschool. Hack the page margins of documents to maximize printing. Imagine a paperless world. Join the growing paperless community. Kill the fax machine; encourage electronic faxing through a service such as HelloFax. Limit yourself to print only on paper that has already been printed on one side. Make online billing and banking a common practice. Nag the kids’ teachers to send home only important papers. Opt out of paper newsletters. Print on both sides when using a new sheet of paper (duplex printing). Question the need for printing; print only when absolutely necessary. In most cases, it is not. Repurpose junk mail envelopes—make sure to cross out any barcode. Sign electronically using the Adobe Acrobat signing feature or SignNow.com. Turn down business cards; enter relevant info directly into a smartphone. Use shredded paper as a packing material, single-printed paper fastened with a metal clip for a quick notepad (grocery lists, errands lists), and double-printed paper to wrap presents or pick up your dog’s feces. Visit the local library to read business magazines and books. Write on paper using a pencil, which you can then erase to reuse paper, or better yet, use your computer, cell phone, or erasable board instead of paper. XYZ: eXamine Your Zipper; i.e., your leaks: attack any incoming source of paper.
Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste (A Simple Guide to Sustainable Living))
We’re no longer basing our opinions on the same data,” Naughton said. “It used to be that we got our facts from the front pages of our local newspapers or the wire services or the networks. “Maybe we agreed or disagreed with their editorials or opinion pieces, but we accepted what was on the front pages or what Walter Cronkite reported as true and we based our own opinions on that. “Now,” he said, “we’re no longer basing our opinions on the same stuff—some folks get one set of facts from one outlet and other folks get another set of facts from another outlet, no wonder they come to different conclusions.” Naughton’s prescient observation about the changing face of journalism has only intensified in the age of digital streaming and social media.
Bob Schieffer (Overload: Finding the Truth in Today's Deluge of News)
Kit spends a week of her summer vacation volunteering at the local theater—she wants to write a newspaper article about a play that’s opening soon. It even stars famous actors from New York City! But behind
Valerie Tripp (Read All About It: A Kit Classic Volume 1 (American Girl Beforever Classic))
Next Wednesday she’d be giving her update to representatives of local newspapers, with smaller circulations than most high schools, and—if she was lucky—some low-rent stringer for the tabloids.
Kristin Hannah (Magic Hour)
The Washington Post had been hit far worse. Its advertising base in D.C. had been decimated, as was the case with many local newspapers,
Jill Abramson (Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts)
No fooling, Keyes thought. He had arrived in Miami in 1979 from a small newspaper in suburban Baltimore. There was nothing original about why he’d left for Florida—a better job, no snow, plenty of sunshine. On his first day at the Miami Sun, Keyes had been assigned the desk next to Skip Wiley—the newsroom equivalent of Parris Island. Keyes covered cops for a while, then courts, then local politics.
Carl Hiaasen (Tourist Season)
Scrapbooks allowed readers to take complete artistic control and create their own bricolage, combining text and image. In the United States they often took the form of highly idiosyncratic anthologies of poetry clipped from newspapers, back when every local newspaper published local poets.36 As a hobby, scrapbooking really took off during the Civil War, when Northerners and Southerners alike assembled their own histories of the conflict, reflecting their respective biases. Confederates naturally liked to clip reports of happy slaves proclaiming their loyalty to their masters.37 They didn’t realize that some former slaves were starting their own scrapbooks.
Jonathan Rose (Readers' Liberation: The Literary Agenda)
After only a day or two, TV and the national and local newspapers had stopped reporting, according to the old-fashioned and easily defensible standpoint that if you didn't have anything to say, you said nothing.
Jonas Jonasson (The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (The Hundred-Year-Old Man, #1))
At age forty-seven, Warren had already accomplished everything he had ever imagined he could want. He was worth $72 million. He ran a company that was worth $135 million.41 His newspaper had won the two highest prizes in journalism. He was one of the most important men in Omaha and increasingly prominent at a national level. He was serving on the boards of the largest local bank, the Washington Post, and a number of other companies. He had been CEO of three companies and had bought and sold successfully more stocks than most people could name in a lifetime. Most of his original partners were now enormously rich. All he wanted was to keep on making money for the thrill of it without changing anything else about his life. He
Alice Schroeder (The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life)
When a school is successful, it is hard to know which factor was most important or if it was a combination of factors.Even the principal and teachers may not know for sure. A reporter from the local newspaper will arrive and decide that it must be the principal or a particular program but the reporter will very likely be wrong. Success, whether defined as high test scores or graduation rates or student satisfaction, cannot be bottled and dispensed at will. This may explain why there are so few examples of low-performing schools that have been "turned around" into high -performing schools. And it may explain why schools are not very good at replicating the success of model schools, whether the models are charters or regular public schools.
Diane Ravitch (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education)
So they went out for a walk. They went through narrow, lightless lanes, where houses that were silent but gave out smells of fish and boiled rice stood on either side of the road. There was not a single tree in sight; no breeze and no sound but the vaguely musical humming of mosquitoes. Once, an ancient taxi wheezed past, taking a short-cut through the lane into the main road, like a comic vintage car passing through a film-set showing the Twenties into the film-set of the present, passing from black and white into colour. But why did these houses – for instance, that one with the tall, ornate iron gates and a watchman dozing on a stool, which gave the impression that the family had valuables locked away inside, or that other one with the small porch and the painted door, which gave the impression that whenever there was a feast or a wedding all the relatives would be invited, and there would be so many relatives that some of them, probably the young men and women, would be sitting bunched together on the cramped porch because there would be no more space inside, talking eloquently about something that didn’t really require eloquence, laughing uproariously at a joke that wasn’t really very funny, or this next house with an old man relaxing in his easy-chair on the verandah, fanning himself with a local Sunday newspaper, or this small, shabby house with the girl Sandeep glimpsed through a window, sitting in a bare, ill-furnished room, memorising a text by candlelight, repeating suffixes and prefixes from a Bengali grammar over and over to herself – why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story – till the reader would shout "Come to the point!" – and there would be no point, except the girl memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small, empty porch which was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The "real" story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.
Amit Chaudhuri (A Strange and Sublime Address)
He selected a honey-soaked pastry and asked for strong Greek coffee and ice water, then put three bucks in the newspaper machine and selected World, Local, and Comics. He read the comics first, as always, to fortify himself. The world news was predictably bleak.
Joe Haldeman (The Coming)