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November 28, 2017

From Harper's:
Parents who encountered their children watching pornography reported, variously, telling the child that it was yoga, telling the child that the naked lady’s shower was broken, or hitting the child.

From The Economist:
[A] time may soon come when old folk sigh with impatience as youngsters tell them how much easier life was “when you were my age”.

From The Economist:
On an average morning a young urban professional anywhere in the world might wake up, check her social-media feed and order a cab on her mobile. While sitting in traffic, she might use her phone to purchase groceries and watch a video, and later to pay the driver and buy a coffee. Once at work, she might make an online payment to reimburse a friend for a concert ticket. So far, so normal. But if that young urbanite were living in China, every one of these activities could have been powered either by Alibaba or a company in which it has a stake.

From The New Yorker:
A survey, conducted in 2014, found that more conservatives than liberals valued living near to extended family. The decision to stay home or leave is a powerful political predictor.

From The TLS (David Bromwich on Books of the Year 2017):
Mort Sahl was among the most astute and ingenious commentators of the Eisen­hower-Kennedy-Nixon era. He disguised his political criticism as stand-up comedy, but threw away the string-of-jokes format of the Borscht Belt. Instead, he offered the rhythms of a continuous non-confessional first-person monologue, a way of talking that Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman, Woody Allen and others would inherit. “Right-wing social democracy” was his name for the spirit of truckling he loathed, the bargain that drove liberals to expand the welfare state even as they supported the Vietnam war. James Curtis’s biography The Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the birth of modern comedy (Mississippi) makes a vivid reminder of Sahl’s originality, including jokes and those one-liners, issued in medias res, that carried an unmistakable sting and signature. “The Cold War – we’re fighting fire with fire. When the Russians put an American in jail, we put an American in jail.”
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