For all the anti-DC talk you hear from politicos, most of them can't get enough of the place. The diagonally slicing arterial avenues are just larded with dudes in khaki pants and gold-buttoned blue blazers who, pre-Pelosi ethics rules, couldn't cram down enough lobbyist-purchased steaks at the charmlessly wood-panelled wine n' dine joints for which the district is so famous. You know how, yesterday, Politico's honchos bemoaned the state of distraction-driven political culture? Yeah, it's like that with politicians who campaign against Washington. Most of these people are having fun there.

-RIP Russ Feingold

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here. And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As “network neutrality” gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea.

-Aaron Sorkin is terribly overrated, unless you are over 40

For Sheikh Jabbar, desperate times required desperate measures. He arranged a meeting with Colonel John Tien of the US Army in which he asked for weapons and ammunition for his men to take on al-Qa'ida. At that point, they numbered in the dozens; eventually the forces, later known as the Sons of Iraq, swelled to 100,000. The Awakening had begun.

"People ask me what was the tipping point in Anbar Province," Colonel Tien said in an interview. "I would say 22 November, the day Sheikh Jabbar entered my tactical operations centre and said 'I want you to help me take back my neighbourhood'."

-well that's in depth article that would never be printed in the USA

There’s a case to be made, of course, that soccer is uniquely adapted for the creation of Federer Moments. Unlike tennis, which augments the player’s physical capabilities with a racket, soccer takes an essential physical tool—the hands—away from the player and forces him to compete in a state of artificial clumsiness. Soccer thus emphasizes the limits of the body and the difficulty of realizing intention. When a player does something amazing, we’re apt to see it not as a superhuman feat (he made the ball travel 150mph!), but as a human victory over what’s essentially an everyday difficulty. If the crisis of having a body is that it’s resistant to our will, soccer exaggerates the crisis, moves what you want to do even further away from what you can do, then gives us athletes who do what they want to anyway. That may be why moments of beauty in soccer, compared to those in other sports, nearly always feel like consolations.

-Run of Play essaying Pele and David Foster Wallace is good

My daughter has come from Los Angeles to live with me. Rhoda is thirty-one, and she used to work in advertising, but now she’s a painter and a maker of other art that I’m not sure how to describe. Her field is bummers. Rhoda’s past exhibitions include leukemia-cluster art, floating-yuan art, water-rights art, and mental-health-funding-cuts art, which was piles of clothes painted bronze and rigged up with speakers that yelled. She has also made a lot of hand art and hair art. Eight years ago, shortly into her new career, while getting the hang of a radial-arm saw, Rhoda severed the index, middle, and ring fingers of her left hand. The surgeons reattached them, and Rhoda recovered nearly complete range of motion, but the shock of the injury caused some of her hair to fall out. She keeps her head shaved close now, a style that improves the plainness of face she inherited from me. Bald, she looks about fifteen years older than she is, but also terrifyingly smart and owlish, Lady Malcolm McDowell

-what the fuck I'm linking to the New Yorker now?

And not to put too fine a point on it, but who freaking cares? All great athletes are arrogant; some just hide it better on camera. The people ladling praise on the guy for saying shucks and thanking the equipment manager and generally being very Beaver Cleaver with everyone—"Durant always asks the [University of Texas] basketball sports information director, Scott McConnell, about his sons by name," the New York Times informs—evidently would rather use athletes as large vessels for vicarious moralizing, something to put down on the mantel next to the Precious Moments figurines, than admit we care about them only because they jump high.

-how dare you belittle media-driven idol worship

But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

-this is why I don't tell anyone about this blog

Sometimes I help L___ with his laptop, and in return he sublimates his disgust and horror at my lack of careerism into a sort of benevolent mercy; the kind one might direct toward a friend’s mentally challenged younger brother who needs help tying his shoes. He wants the best for me. He knows I have it in me, somewhere. He saw the zeal and determination with which I used to lie on my couch and watch MTV Jams in college—if only he could bring Mystikal out of retirement (prison?) to help him coach me.

-you say 'lack of careerism' like it's a bad thing

But now kids buy shit. They really buy shit. Kids buy designer stuff. So you're being constantly pounded by marketing. And if you want to be a rebel, well, there's rebel clothing companies. There's rebel stick-on tattoos. You can get a rebel skateboard. You just pick your rebel mode and there's a whole online shopping network that you can be a part of. So kids may look punk or feel punk, but what they're kind of doing is the same as like, being really swept up in high school sports or something. But when I was a kid, you didn't know. I was like, "I guess Kraftwerk is punk?" I remember I got Sex Pistols, Kraftwerk's Computer World and Venom on the same day. And I thought it was all punk. It was just everything that was weird. Everything that wasn't Bruce Springsteen-- who turns out to be a lot punker than I thought at the time.

-it's reassuring when your taste in music corresponds with your politics