NYRB

10-23-08—I just took rurality as my ground... The landscapes [of Wyoming and Newfoundland] are different, but the economic situations and the beliefs of the people who live in the places are quite similar, because [the people] can’t see who’s making the rules and the economic strategies that govern them, they continue to believe in the independent rural life, which is deliciously ironic and very said. –Annie Proulx, NYRB (Oct. 23, 2008) p. 41,

--A Web site that tracks security issues has estimated that in 2008, the US defense budget will be $711 billion, or about 48 % of overall world military spending. This would be close to twice as much as the budgets of Europe and China, the second- and third- biggest military spenders, combined. –Alan Ryan, NYRB (Oct. 23, 2008) p. 4159.

9-25-08—The astrophysicist Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas, in a fight with zealots who wanted equal time for creationism in the Kansas public schools, founded an organization called FLAT (Families for Learning Accurate Theories). His society parodied creationists by demanding equal time for flat earth geography, arguing that children should be exposed to both sides of the controversy over the shape of the earth. –Steven Weinberg, NYRB p. 73.

--[Obama’s] coalition represents, in a very literal sense, an America of the future in which there will be more white-collar tech-related jobs and fewer blue-collar manufacturing jobs. There will be more immigrants and people of color and fewer Anglo-Saxon whites. Cities and inner-ring suburbs will be more important than small towns and sprawling, diffuse exurbs. The concerns of the middle and upper-middle classes will predominate in political life, not those of the working class (i.e., not the traditional “backbone of the Democrat Party” of the passing industrial age). It will, finally, be a country more reliant on the young than the old. –Michael Tomasky, NYRB 81.