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ce9852a
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I jerked my head at the billboard and asked J.Lo, "What is that thing even trying to sell me, anyway?" "Eh," said J.Lo as he tried to think of how to explain it. "Is a kind of strap for people whose eyes are too big. Aslike a bra for your face."
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Adam Rex |
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564a705
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Everybodies always is wanting to make a clone for to doing their work. If you are not wanting to do your work, why would a clone of you want to do your work?
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Adam Rex |
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1ac8515
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But this is what I also thought as I watched the waves of trash crash over the cracked and broken road: that for the rest of us, Arizona would always be one of our places now. It would be on the list of things we own in our heads. Don't we all have this list? It's like, everything that secretly belongs to us--a favorite color, or springtime, or a house we don't live in anymore. We all gained Arizona by coming here, but for the people who al..
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Adam Rex |
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554f431
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The sky looked really great when nearly the entire country was blacked out. Of course, now it looked dangerous, too. I wondered if it would ever be just the night sky again, and not a black sea, full of sharks. Anyway,
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Adam Rex |
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e791fcc
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Well, naturally, some of the animals must have escaped from the Wild World Animal Park, and part of it tried to remember if anyone in school ever told us what to do when faced with a lion; but no, of course they didn't, they were too busy teaching really useful things like the state capitals.
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Adam Rex |
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83c67c0
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I grabbed a bottle of glass cleaner because it comforted me to hold something in my hand that had a trigger, such as it was. I
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Adam Rex |
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d918669
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Once I was in a bicycle accident, and I lay in the street for a long time afterward. People surrounded me and wouldn't let me stand up until the paramedics arrived. When they did, they asked if I knew who the president was, and what state I lived in, and how much was three times seven. When I answered everything correctly they seemed pleased, so they asked my name and I said "Gratuity," and then they wouldn't let me up until I told them it ..
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Adam Rex |
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146fd87
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So I sang the first Italian song that came into my head, which turned out to be "Volare." I'm sure I need not mention at this point that I am a rock star, and it sounded fantastic. J.Lo"
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Adam Rex |
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53c6788
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Who wants a leader who wants to be leader?" And I could see his point there. I've always sort of thought we ought to keep a close eye on anyone who wants power over others."
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Adam Rex |
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9f9b6a2
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Sejal had not often thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts--the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to pu..
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Adam Rex |
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438f7f2
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Aw, hewwo, widdle Chihuahua," she said. "Hewwo."
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Adam Rex |
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ba22442
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J.Lo looked miserable. You wouldn't think you could tell that when a person's wearing a ghost suit, but you can.
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Adam Rex |
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46e89c1
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Ohh!" said J.Lo. "Oooooh! My tummy!" I set him down. "Are you okay? I thought they missed us." "It...must not work on humans. Feel like i could marf....Like I could marf right out my poomp," J.Lo insisted."
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Adam Rex |
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9ae34be
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I'm part fairy,' said John. There was a quiet pause, and he eyed the man. 'Is that a problem?' 'No, sir. The United States military is very accepting of that sort of thing nowadays.
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Adam Rex |
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06d960a
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You know what's weird, though? It's weird that the ark would be such a kids' story, you know? I mean, it's...really a story about death. Every person who isn't in Noah's family? They die. Every animal, apart from the two of each on the boat? They die. They all die in the flood. Billions of creatures. It's the worst tragedy ever," I finished, my voice tied off by a knot in my chest. I'd been speaking too fast without breathing, and I sucked ..
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Adam Rex |
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c95cef8
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You know that part in the story where the character thinks, I bet I didn't really see a ghost after all. I bet it was just a sheet. Wearing chains. Floating through our pantry. Shrieking. I bet it was just my imagination. You know how you always kind of hate characters who think that? You hate them, and you know you'd never be so stupid not to know a ghost when you saw one, especially when the title of your story is The Shrieking Specter, f..
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Adam Rex |
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8b85998
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It is, I think, the journalist's vice to believe that all history can instantly be reduced to experience: ("Pierre, an out-of-work pipe fitter in the suburb of Boulougne, is typical of the new class of chomeurs . . .") just as it is the scholar's vice to believe that all experience can be reduced to history ("The new world capitalist order produced a new class of chomeurs, of whom Pierre, a pipe fitter, was a typical case . . .")."
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Adam Gopnik |
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dee4758
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One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemployment ... Most of the other problems, the ones that create a sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing government's tentative attempts at reform will eventually corral France into an 'Anglo-Saxon' economy, where an unleashed free market will make everybody do awful jobs for no money, forever. - 71
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free-market
work
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Adam Gopnik |
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e4df77a
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Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right.
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Adam Gopnik |
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3446ce4
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The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in midair into another. -109
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talk
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Adam Gopnik |
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b5f3301
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There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't.
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Adam Gopnik |
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7cc05b6
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The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things. It is the moment when the red onions have been chopped and the bacon has been sliced into lardons and the chestnuts have been peeled, and they are all mijoteing together in the pot, and then--a specific moment--the colors begin to change, and the smells gather together just at the level of your nose. Everything begins to mottle, be..
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Adam Gopnik |
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44ad782
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How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.
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Adam Gopnik |
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27abf51
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What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too.
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Adam Gopnik |
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cb5b8a8
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What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Asterix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack of vigilant curiosity, the incapacity for critical self-reflection, the readiness to afficher erreur distante and wait for somebody else to change the paper.
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Adam Gopnik |
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31309d7
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67-If talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sports, getting involved with the bureaucracy takes the place of exercise. Every French man and woman is engaged in a constant entanglement with one ministry of another, and I have come to realize that these entanglements are what take the place of going to a gym where people actually work out. Three or four days a week you're given something to do that is time-consuming, ..
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exercise
mental-failure
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Adam Gopnik |
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cb85751
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The world was once haunted by Titus Oates's self-made epitaph: "I am going outside and may be some time. Well, we are going inside and may be some time, we are inside, and have been for awhile. The poetry of courage is replaced by the poetry of confinement, the art of the endless open channel overtaken by the art of the perpetually retold tale. Our successful withdrawal from the risks of winter makes for a lessening of its intensities. We h..
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Adam Gopnik |
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37cc54b
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There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a conter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Telecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can't find them on the computer inventory ... the bus driver who won't let an exhausted pregnant woman out the front door of the bus (you're suppose to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness. ..
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status
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Adam Gopnik |
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596c81a
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Commentary by J.-P. Quelin, food critic for Le Monde). [New York and London chefs] are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine. (This I think is true. When I took my brother to L'Arpege for his birthday we got fourteen -small- courses ... that made even the best of the old cuisine look like sludge.) /289
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criticism
cuisine
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Adam Gopnik |
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a06e243
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Tenderness toward one's lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one's lost longings is just life.
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Adam Gopnik |
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e1be2aa
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It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed.
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Adam Gopnik |
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fb139d0
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we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains.
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Adam Gopnik |
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1bbd0f8
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In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation.
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Adam Gopnik |
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0d7ecee
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A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it's in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That's the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful--they are goddesses--and yet a man mu..
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Adam Gopnik |
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3e62008
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The real "crisis" in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an international language, and this will not end. When people talk about globalization, what they're really saying is that an English-speaking imperium now stretches from Adelaide to Vancouver, and that anyone who is at home in one bit of it is..
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Adam Gopnik |
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9333421
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The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small--to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways--to get it.
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Adam Gopnik |
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dbc5723
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There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who's called Hal--like Falstaff's prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so thro..
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Adam Gopnik |
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a88157b
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parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass.
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Adam Gopnik |
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c7c3a2c
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Family life is by its nature cocooned, and expatriate family life doubly so. We had many friends and a few intimate ones, but it is in the nature of family rhythm--up too early, asleep too soon--to place you on a margin, and to the essential joy--just the three of us!--was added the essential loneliness, just the three of us.
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Adam Gopnik |
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f267d02
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Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle.
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Adam Gopnik |
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e3f9088
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There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights, and what
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Adam Gopnik |
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f8291e2
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sometimes crazy uncles--from Samuel Johnson to G. K. Chesterton.
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Adam Gopnik |
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f6f21f7
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feeling for normal frailty and for mercy before justice and humanity before dogma,
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Adam Gopnik |
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bbcaa63
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I understand why people play [soccer]. ... I even learned how to talk the game. It was the opposite of trash talking--tidy talking. I suppose you'd have to call it. If you did something good, it was brilliant; something less than brilliant was useless; if all of you were useless together, you were rubbish; and if a person did something brilliant that nonetheless became useless, everyone cried, 'Oh, unlucky!' - 216
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talk-the-game
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Adam Gopnik |