Ben Fulton is managing editor of The Common Reader. Before moving to St. Louis he was editor of Salt Lake City Weekly, Utah’s alternative newsweekly. His work has been published in New York’s Newsday and has garnered regional awards, including Best of the West and Top of the Rockies.
The “hatchet man” for President Nixon, and a chief architect of both Nixon’s “dirty tricks” and the team of “Plumbers” who schemed to smear, libel, drug, and, in at least one case, even assassinate the president’s vast list of “enemies,” lived not just to endure the stain of a criminal conviction and seven months in federal prison, but seemingly transcend it. Watergate historians, however, are not so kind.
Of course knives have utility. It is just that not everything they do is ultimately useful, or always under our control.
Not once did its wood frame break down, groan under weight, or so much as emit a creaking whine. Credit must be given to the Danes who designed it and then brought it into existence. But credit must also be given to its generous spirit. My old sofa, dubbed “El Trono,” never gave up. And I never gave up on “El Trono.”
Slang is those half-hidden words, code intended only for certain circles, or what our parents used to call “the in-crowd.” “Six-seven!” seems unique in that it has nothing to hide. Past slang involving numbers—the one-to-ten scale of physical attractiveness, the “Five-0” reference to police, the “4:20” signifier for a daily dose of cannabis—all had immediate or even urgent significance. “Six-seven,” by contrast, just sits in its own hollow existence.
It seems fitting that this unnamed woman has so far proved—at least until Noem and her team choose to reveal more—as shadowy as the group she is alleged to have allied with, or was at least sympathetic to.
Do you harbor secret, romantic longings for doing battle with “The Man,” but without the consequences of violent action and even murderous mayhem such causes reap? If so, you have plenty of films to choose from.
Perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that his paradox has at least survived long enough to be quoted and debated in our current age of AI anxiety. Perhaps we should hope against hope that Jevons paradox will prove itself useful all over again.
When we are up against the inevitable limits of human invention and our capacity for patience, it is the music that matters most.
Flattery flattens a person, robbing us of complexity and crippling our will and ability to exchange and understand truths—even the hard ones—we might gain from others.
The War Game and Threads have no time for dramatic trifles of characters dealing with nuclear war from afar, or even the relative safety of a military bunker. Instead, both films plunge us deep into their dreaded, adrenaline-soaked horrors.
Should we not be grateful that companies care enough to hire skilled graphic designers educated in the ways of soft-selling via design and color, and not the bark of street hawkers?
(Photo by Marcus Loke via Unsplash) People in their late teens and early twenties are prone to conversational silence around most adults, their parents included. But there is an easy way around this reticence if you want to get to know them better: Just peek into their…