Quotes

But these small stories will remain a part of our collective human memory and help guide the decisions of future societies, because the Internet does not forget, does not forgive and cannot be stopped. Ever.

Now, Sim City is a game, and to be fun it has to be quick to learn, so of course it will simplify.  The problem is that these two fallacies in SIm City are also great fallaces of mid-late 20th Century urbanism.  Sim City didn’t just simplify, it simplified in the direction of the old habits of urbanist thought — habits that were already being challenged (in part by the New Urbanism) by the time the game was invented in the late 1980s. In short, Sim City could be hailed as a triumph of reactionary brainwashing — in that it instilled in a generation of 1990s teen geeks all the worst assumptions of 1960s city planning.

From a coworker: Kissing became habit in ancient Rome bc husbands wanted to see if their wives had been hitting the wine while they were out

For the plaintiffs and more specifically for me, it is time to pause for breath, a time to contemplate that this settlement can finally release us from the torments of the past so that we can face the future with a tangible measure of hope. Or just maybe it is time to stop being the son of my father and be the father to my sons.

After a quarter of a decade representing parts of East Harlem, Mendez changed her status to Republican. She explained her move by saying Democrats had done little to help her district. But in the general election, José Serrano defeated her by a wide margin in the heavily Democratic district.

A raucous leadership fight erupted on the floor of the Senate around 3 p.m., with two Democrats, Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate of Queens, joining the 30 Senate Republicans in a motion that would displace Democrats as the party in control.

Instead of boarding up an unoccupied luxury condo in Crown Heights and letting it fall into disrepair, the owner has done the unthinkable: arranged to let homeless people live there. The new apartments, which were originally priced up to $350,000, seem pretty nice; one resident who moved in with his wife and two young daughters tells the Daily News, “When I first saw it, I was like, ‘Damn, everything is brand new.’ It has marble counters and marble floors in the bathrooms, too. I like the big kitchen. That’s my favorite.” Another new resident, an out-of-work truck driver from Miami who’s living with his teenage son, crows, “The closet in the main room is so big you could put a twin bed in there.”

In the spring of 1989, thousands of students from China’s elite universities occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing for weeks to protest government corruption and demand democracy. More than a million people took to the streets. Then on June 4, as the world watched, Army troops and tanks rolled into the square, firing on the crowd and killing hundreds.

How long can the regime keep expressions of discontent from snowballing again into something that threatens its power? This remains an open question, especially in light of the global economic downturn, which has not hit China as hard as it has many other countries but has led to a staggering number of factory closings and prompted an urban-to-rural migration of many workers who are not happy to be heading home. This is a phenomenon to watch, since economic frustrations were a crucial spur to action in 1989 and are likely to figure centrally in the next big challenge the leadership faces from below.