Thursday Links, Agglomerated

Nathan Smith: “American egalitarianism is a sheltered creed that needs the border as blindfold to retain its limited plausibility as an ideal.”
Literary Magazines for Socialists funded by the CIA, ranked (Partisan Review is #3)
Pope Francis to visit a Pennsylania prison and call for reform in Congress.
Michael Rosen: I sometimes fear that people might think that fascism arrives in fancy dress worn by grotesques and monsters as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis. Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean up the neighbourhood, remind you of how great you once were, clear out the venal and the corrupt, remove anything you feel is unlike you…It doesn’t walk in saying, “Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”
W. H. Auden: “There were two kinds of machinery for separating the slime, one I thought more beautiful than the other, but the other one I knew to be more efficient. I felt myself faced with what I can only call a moral choice—it was my duty to take the second and more efficient one. Later, I realized, in constructing this world which was only inhabited by me, I was already beginning to learn how poetry is written.”
Tax preparers lobby for more complicated taxes.

Comments