Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Coronavirus News (291)

An Undercover Trip Into the Rageful Worlds of Incels and White Supremacists online chat rooms where lonely men find succor in misogyny and white supremacy .......... the “social isolation and erotic frustration” that seemed to drive them ........ the language of extremists tends to occupy the space between risible and profoundly dumb .......... Contemporary white supremacy is a mishmash of old anti-Semitic tropes, racist pseudoscience and bizarre fantasia — what Lavin calls a “bigot’s pastiche.” ......... (Neo-Nazis famously love to use “88,” because the eighth letter in the alphabet is H, and 88 signifies “Heil Hitler”; I learned from Lavin’s book that some enterprising Christian neo-Nazis have also started using “83,” for an oxymoronic “Heil Christ.”) ............... Radicalization often happens online nowadays .........  American and European “accelerationists” who are trying to incite a race war. ......... “bigotry and Nazism should have a social cost.” ......... a cadre of “launderers” who repackage far-right ideas into edgy-but-not-quite-bannable videos that get them clicks and converts on YouTube. ......... “Let us hold it to the light — this wet, rotting, malodorous thing — and let it dry up and crumble into dust and be gone.”

Just Like You, Claire Messud Never Read ‘A Brief History of Time’  You know, often when you meet writers, they disappoint. There’s no reason for a brilliant writer to be good company. ......... Each of us has our own literary taste, just as in music or food. 


Matthew McConaughey he knows there are people who think, “Gosh dang, McConaughey just eases right into everything — the guy doesn’t seem to have any bumps, doesn’t get hit crossing the road.” He said he wrote “Greenlights” partly as a corrective to this perception, to show how much effort it has taken to get where he is. ........... No one can escape hardship, he said, but he can share the lessons “that helped me navigate the hard stuff — like I say, ‘get relative with the inevitable’ — sooner and in the best way possible for myself.” ...........  “I’m still continuously testing and updating my philosophies, practically daily” ............  The book’s first chapter dramatizes a scene from 1974 where McConaughey watched the couple fight ferociously — his mother having broken his father’s nose with a telephone while he brandished a ketchup bottle — before his parents had sex on the kitchen floor. Image ........... “It’s a state of being that I work at, continuously, daily, and I break a sweat to get it.” ............ someone who is perpetually preparing himself for opportunities and actively steering himself toward them. .......... “People underestimate the utter intentionality of what Matthew’s done. He’s really good at going from A to B to C. He’s got a plan and he’s just brave enough and brazen enough to execute it.” ........... “He wasn’t discovered in a bar — he went over to the guy who he heard was casting it. Matthew’s always playing the long game.” ............. a practicing Methodist but also describes himself as “an optimistic mystic,” forever fine-tuning his personal dials in search of further broadcasts from the universe. ...............  That approach to existence has sent McConaughey hunting for what he calls “greenlights” — the traffic signals that mean go, which he prefers to spell as a single word and which he believes take skill and acumen to identify. ............   You’re making choices. They matter.” .......... “It’s his way of wanting to be heard on another level” ....... “It’s another level of communication that you can’t get in a role.” ..........  “Even the most powerful actors — Denzel Washington, Daniel Day-Lewis — are still at the mercy of the parts they’re being offered. Actors need these other outlets.” ............ “If you’re high enough, the sun’s always shining.” ............  (“Don’t leave crumbs”; “Dissect your successes”; “A roof is a man-made thing”). .............  “All of a sudden, my wife was like, ‘Get in the truck, load up your food, water and tequila, and don’t come back until you’ve got something,’” he recalled. “So, bam, I called a friend with a cabin and hit the desert.” .........  “Could this actually be a banner year, where things got started?” he asked. “Where we got cleansed? A little evolution would be nice.”
Doctors May Have Found Secretive New Organs in the Center of Your Head They appear to be a fourth pair of large salivary glands, tucked into the space where the nasal cavity meets the throat. ......... Any modern anatomy book will show just three major types of salivary glands: one set near the ears, another below the jaw and another under the tongue. “Now, we think there is a fourth” ......... we are in 2020 and have a new structure identified in the human body.”   



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