"You don’t build someone up by putting them down. You don’t help someone into employment by pushing them into poverty.
By keeping the unemployment benefit low, successive governments have deliberately humiliated people rather than improving their chances of employment."
Labor goes from Robin Hood to the Sheriff of Nottingham - Eureka Street
"What’s most galling is that a franchise renowned for its contemplation of moral and social quandaries and for a hopeful vision of a more compassionate future has been reduced to a noisy, unambitious, generic action-adventure that actively rejects meaning. Seeing Gene Roddenberry’s credit shortly after the credits began jarred because it was hard to reconcile what his name represents with the film that just ended."
The first major study of tiger moms is out. The kids have worse grades, and they are more depressed and more alienated from their parents.
"I am a master at sullying my own name and, all things considered, being associated with the worst software on the planet ranks way down the pole. It’s barely a blip in the ocean of associations - madman, paranoid, child molester, murderer, drug addict, unstable, liar, to name but a few.Thank god I’m 67 and will probably be too hard of hearing soon enough to have to listen to them rattling around wherever I go."
"My mother found Danny the next morning. He was curled on the floor beside his bed like a bird that had fallen from its nest. It was a clear spring morning, less than a week before Mother’s Day. He was 28."
My Brother, My Mother, and a Call Girl | The Hairpin [That is some good writing, I have a lump in my throat now]
"there is now clear evidence from two countries that holding a guitar increases a man’s attractiveness to potential mates."
The Mating Advantage of Male Musicians: Women Find Guitars Sexy [I’m only interested in mates of calibre]
"All screenwriters think their babies are beautiful. I’m here to tell it like it is: Some babies are ugly."
Vinny Bruzzese in Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data - NYTimes.com
"This is my worst nightmare. It’s the enemy of creativity, nothing more than an attempt to mimic that which has worked before. It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road."
Ol Parker (writer) in Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data - NYTimes.com
"Will is a child’s motive force: it impels a child from within, whereas obedience compels a child from without. Those who would overrule a child’s will take “obedience” as their watchword, as they fear disobedience and disorder and believe that if a child is not controlled, there will be chaos. But these are false opposites. The true opposite of obedience is not disobedience but independence. The true opposite of order is not disorder but freedom. The true opposite of control is not chaos but self-control."
Why parents should leave their kids alone | Life and style | The Guardian
