The Big Fail

 "On July 6th, he posted another of his incendiary all-cap tweets. 'SCHOOLS MUST REOPEN IN THE FALL,"'it read. The next day, at a White House event, the president said, 'We're very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools. It's very important for our country. It's very important for the well-being of the students and the parents.' Trump was right. It was important. But by this late stage in his presidency, just about every democrat assumed that anything he said was a lie. That was especially true with his pandemic statements. This, after all, was  a man who suggested that ingesting disinfectant might deter the virus. If Trump thought schools should be open, all the more reason to fight to keep them closed. The strong reaction against anything that came out of Trump's mouth was understandable on one level, but on another level, it was inexcusable. Long before vaccine hesitancy became an issue, the fight over schools was an early sign of how stupidly polarized the country had become. And in this case, it wasn't the red states refusing to follow the science. It was blue state democrats, who valued their political affiliation over common sense, and even over their pre-pandemic pretensions about protecting the underprivileged."

The Berry Pickers

"Hope is such a wonderful thing until it isn't. That sadness that Mom had managed to harness since Ruthie went missing and since Charlie's death, threatened to unravel right there and then."

"Things always seem worse just after they happen."

"Alice always said that holding in tears is like holding in pee. It's gonna hurt eventually. So you might as well let them go as soon as you feel them."

What You Are Looking For Is In The Library

"Being born is probably the most difficult thing that we ever have to do. I am convinced that everything else that comes after it is nowhere near as hard. If you can survive the ordeal of being born, you can get through anything."

"'...I want to try and change. Thanks to this book.'

A broad smile lit Ms Komachi's face. 'You may say that it was the book, but it's how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself.'"

"'Does this kind of thing really happen? It's too good to be true. I can't believe an opportunity like this would just fall into my lap.'

Shuji looked at me. 'You're wrong,' he said earnestly. 'This didn't just come to you. It happened because you did something for yourself. You took action and that caused things to change around you.'

I started at him, and he smiled at me reassuringly. 'You made this opportunity happen.'"

The Man Who Could Move Clouds

"There are many ways to erase the past. In the 1990s, in Bogota, my secondary school thought it important that students learn English.... In their classrooms... they lectured us on things that were hard for us to grasp. For example: that realistic fiction was Jane Austen, and fantasy fiction was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Magical realism was just realism to us, and Jane Austen was not any life that was possible in our land. Still, they renewed their efforts to teach us clear boundaries, strict differentiations. There were names for what some of us lived, saw, and believed--legends, superstitions, fictions."

"A circle is a straight line, haunted by something living at its middle-- a ghost that causes it to bend and bend." 

Time off

Ideas

• Aristotle taught on the mobility of leisure. He said we rest for the sake of work, and we work for the sake of leisure. It is the highest on the pyramid.
• Bertrand Russel thought we should work for 4 hours and not engage in frivolity for the rest, but to do things that contribute to culture. The goal is, for example, anyone to be able to paint (no matter how bad they may actually be at painting) and not have to worry how he will eat.
• The Protestant work ethic was a way for the Puritan upper class to control poor people, and they said work (and work alone) was noble. This fostered the idea that work = good and idleness = bad. And apparently this was all based on (an apparently corrupted from) the idea that God left us work to do.
• We used to work to be productive, then with the Industrial Revolution, it wasn't about productivity but time, so leisure became money lost. Historian EP Thompson said, "Time is now currency."
• Reminds us of Newport saying "Busyness as a proxy for productivity"

"This book exists because we are extremely optimistic that our culture can find its way back to moble leisure, one little step at a time. But we want to reiterate, if it’s not already abundantly clear, that we’re not advocating a culture of laziness, sloth, or stagnation. It is a culture in which productivity and the joy of life go hand-in-hand, a culture of productivity in a much brighter sense rather than just economic output. A culture of creative, scientific, spiritual, and humanitarian progress. A culture of noble leisure" (45). 

"Counterintuitively, putting more energy into leisure can energize us overall" (57). 

The Best of You by Alison Cook

"Simply put trust is the 'belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.'"

Oath and Honor

 "...the Republican National Committee, or RNC, convened for its winter meeting. They adopted a resolution censuring Adam Kinzinger and me. In a statement referring to the January 6 investigation as 'the persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,' the RNC accused Kinzinger and me of engaging 'in behavior which has been destructive to the institution of the US House of Representatives, the Republican Party, and our republic...'"

"...Trump and I weren't having some kind of policy disagreement or political debate. I wasn't going to capitulate: 'Trump tried to overturn an election. He went to war with the rule of law. He violated his oath to the Constitution.'"

"There was no bitterness in Vice President Gore's voice as he left to carry out his constitutional duty...Al Gore had conceded the race, saying, in part: 'Almost a century and a half ago, Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, "Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I'm with you, Mr. President, and God bless you."'"

"duty above partisanship"