Diary, Curious News
There is often a fine line between a hero and villain. Many people have a hard time realizing: just because people have done a good thing it does not mean that they are nice people. By the same token, just because somebody is nice, it does not mean that they make a positive difference in the world. Life is complicated and people are complex! By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA (NY Times)WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety
LONDON—Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears. He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.
Diary, Must Know
Atul Gawande, a doctor and staff writer of the New Yorker, has already received numerous awards for this writing. Now he has penned in the New Yorker (August 2, 2010) a report on how American medicine handles the final stages of our lives. This is the most difficult story I have read in many years, perhaps ever. But I forced myself to read it all the way to the end. You owe it to youself to do the same. Gwande deserves the Pulitzer Prize for this article. Read “Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left” here.Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?
Diary, Astute Observations
From the the Writer’s Almanac: On this day in 1864 Union General Sherman wrote to the Atlanta City Council: “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” General Sherman had just captured Atlanta. Along the way, his soldiers had taken part in something known as “total war”: They’d burned down crops, confiscated millions of pounds of corn and feed, and destroyed thousands of horses and mules and cows. They’d wrecked bridges, torn up railroad tracks to make train transport unusable, and they’d destroyed telegraph lines. In late August, they’d forced the surrender of Atlanta, occupied the city, and demanded that it be evacuated.General Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”
Diary
Starded reading The Catcher in the Rye and I am lovin’ it. You sense clearly on the first couple of pages that Salinger has invented a new voice back in 1945. The voice of still feels fresh and strong. Update: December 6, 2010. I finally finished reading this 192 page book yesterday. My fall was not a bountiful harvest for literature as you can see from these stats. This is 64 pages per month or two pages a day of reading. Well, it is at least not as pathetic as in high school when we discussed the book in class but I never read it. But I do have a good memory of the book cover. I will write a some observations about this American classic in the next couple of days.The Catcher in the Rye
Diary
This Night Only [Eric Satie: GYMNOPÉDIE #1] Moonlight now on Malibu From the Writer’s AlmanacPoem of the Day: “This Night Only”
by Kenneth Rexroth
The winter night the few stars
Far away millions of miles
The sea going on and on
Forever around the earth
Far and far as your lips are near
Filled with the same light as your eyes
Darling darling darling
The future is long gone by
And the past will never happen
We have only this
Our one forever
So small so infinite
So brief so vast
Immortal as our hands that touch
Deathless as the firelit wine we drink
Almighty as this single kiss
That has no beginning
That will never
Never
End
© 2026 Peter Murmann. Powered by ExpressionEngine.
