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# Stylized Facts

## Frequent sideblog: Coruscation .

« February 2010 | Main | May 2010 »

## March 23, 2010

### The most important economic competition is actually between you and your own imagination -- Tom Friedman

This isn't complicated.

-- Tom Friedman

## March 21, 2010

### The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.

What caused this dire loss of faith in our government and leaders?

He surveys an earlier and "superior class of statesmen," who, regardless of its members' political leanings, "represented a political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities." Politically speaking, he declares, "ours is an age of the pygmies."

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West missed an opportunity to reshape the world. "Instead," Mr. Judt writes, "we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the cold war: a sure way to lose the peace."

-- Tony Judt

## March 15, 2010

### Following through on the metaphor

Raising social issues, the movement's leaders say, risks fracturing the strength it has built. "Every social issue you bring in, you're adding planks to your mission," said Frank Anderson, a founder of the Independence Caucus, based in Utah. "And planks become splinters ."

U.S.
Tea Party Avoids Divisive Social Issues
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: March 12, 2010
God, life and family get little mention in the party's statements, with the focus instead on fiscal responsibility.

## March 10, 2010

### the dark, half- crippled, doughnut-gobbling man-apes of the literary world

So let's read Lipsyte and rejoice; let's celebrate the laugh-producing Milo Burkes who are all too rarely brought to us by brave and bitter men -- let's celebrate the canny, well-educated yet perpetually failing furtive Internet onanists, the dark, half- crippled, doughnut-gobbling man-apes of the literary world, who cast their lumpen shadows across the rest of us.

These are the kind of unlikable, lovable protagonists we miss; these are the self-loathing, mediocre secret geniuses who can set our people free.

Lydia Millet's

## March 7, 2010

### Enquiring Press needed -- Douthat

It's remarkable, in a way, that the Enquirer still exists at all, let alone that it's enjoying a moment in the journalistic sun. In the age of Gawker, Twitter, and TMZ.com, a weekly scandal sheet seems quaint, if not archaic.

But you'd be wrong.

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Enquiring Minds
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: February 21, 2010
Not all affairs produce corruption, but the media should be willing to go digging for those private acts that should be publicly disqualifying.