… tweeting.

Ask around Poznan and residents offer all sorts of different explanations for [Poland's] recent [economic] success. Some say history has inured Poles to such drastic turns in their fortune that they enjoy life while they can, spending their hard-earned zlotys. Others say they learned to be resourceful under the hardship of Communism, where a company like Apart once had to buy old gold jewelry and melt it down before it could make a new ring or bracelet.

Mr. Niespodziany attributed it to a positive form of incompetence. “Even the crisis doesn’t work in Poland,” he joked.

[Camus] fell in love several times over, notably with Patricia Blake, a 19-year-old student and Vogue apprentice. He read her pages from “The Plague” and she, in return, noting his fascination with the American way of death, found him issues of undertakers’ trade magazines — Sunnyside, Casket,and Embalmer’s Monthly. He particularly admired a funeral parlor ad: “You die. We do the rest.”

From an article about Camus and Sartre in New York.

Readers will be reminded of the case of Johan Hari, a young hot British journalist who got much farther than Jonah Lehrer has along these lines.

Mr. Buatta did turn down a job for a “pizza king,” who wanted the Prince of Chintz to design a kind of dungeon in an A-frame house on Long Island. As Mr. Buatta recalled: “I told him, ‘I don’t do this. I do English style.’ And he said, ‘What kind of a meatball are you?’ I heard later he’d been found dead in his car.”

UD has always found his 1997 essay, Cars and their Enemies, repulsive. A striking example of American entitlement, it’s also pointlessly flippant and nonchalantly incorrect.

Nowhere, in his paean to the car, does Wilson talk about any location in the world but the United States of America (occasionally he touches on Europe, in order to ridicule its system of trains). It seems not to occur to him that what the car does, it does to the globe, and so confining yourself to what it does to Washington DC and San Francisco is irresponsible.

Wilson loves the feel of the wind in his hair as he speeds through the countryside. He can’t get this feeling unless he’s alone, and only a car delivers absolute privacy.

These feelings are quintessentially American, and people who don’t like cars are unAmerican:

Cars are about privacy; critics say privacy is bad and prefer group effort. (Of course, one rarely meets these critics in groups. They seem to be too
busy rushing about being critics.) [No one says privacy is bad and insists on solidarity all the time... except ... what? Socialists?] Cars are about autonomy; critics say that the pursuit of autonomy destroys community. [Ask someone who has pissed away large amounts of his life sitting in traffic how autonomous that made him feel. He's stuck in traffic because like everyone else around him he has no option but to take the one feeder highway available to his job. Talk about personal liberty.] (Actually, cars allow people to select the kind of community in which they want to live.) [Just the opposite. Many people tend to live in very distant, less expensive exurbs because they figure they can commute a bit longer and save on the price of the house. They're not choosing hours each day of car dependency.
This is simply the best they can do.] Cars are about speed; critics abhor the fatalities they think speed causes. (In fact, auto fatalities have been declining for decades, including after the 55-mile-per-hour national speed limit was repealed. Charles Lave suggests that this is because higher speed limits reduce the variance among cars in their rates of travel, thereby producing less passing and overtaking, two dangerous highway maneuvers.) [Critics abhor the fatalities cars cause. Note that Wilson says nothing here about injuries rather than fatalities.] Cars are about the joyous sensation of driving on beautiful country roads; critics take their joy from politics. [Does Wilson really think he's making a point here? Is he being funny? He doesn't care about the answer to these questions. He's too insouciant. That's been his tone throughout. I like cars, and you can fuck yourself.] (A great failing of the intellectual life of this country is that so much of it is centered in Manhattan, where one finds the highest concentration of nondrivers in the country.) Cars make possible Wal-Mart, Home Depot, the Price Club, and other ways of allowing people to shop for rockbottom prices; critics want people to spend their time gathering food at downtown shops (and paying the much higher prices that small stores occupying expensive land must charge).

Endless rockbottom-price exurbs full of people bumping around in cars all day — I’ve drunk the milk of Paradise.

The pride of the University of Montana.

Jane Brody reminds UD to mention that the magazine of New Yorker cartoons she read on her flight to Phoenix featured at least six cartoons whose punch line depended on the fact that zillions of Americans are taking antidepressants.

And the next edition of the DSM will guarantee that the few of us left in this country who are not dependent on these pills will soon be taken into the fold.

“He (Gingrich) said, ‘You know and I know that she’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president,’” [Leonard] Carter, who now lives in South Carolina, told CNN recently, relating the conversation he had with Gingrich the day Gingrich revealed he was filing for [his first] divorce. Carter served as treasurer of Gingrich’s first congressional campaigns.

Lee Hausner, a California-based psychologist who works with the ultrarich, has one client she calls “The Phoenix,” a real-estate developer and investor who borrowed and spent heavily. He has surged and crashed twice over the past decade, reaching a net worth of $400 million, losing it, then hitting $200 million and losing it again.

“He’s an impulsive risk-taker,” she says. “He always lays everything on the line.”

For risk-takers who want to get rich and stay rich, Ms. Hausner advises taking a step back every so often and evaluating important decisions rather than leaving them to impulse.

“Some of these people roll the dice and they get rich,” she says. “But they have to realize that if they roll it again, the result may not come out as well. They need to stop themselves before they roll again, and deliberate.”

Noting that there were reporters in the room, [the judge] read Doyle’s rap sheet into the record, including his convictions for stealing a BMW, posing as a furrier to swipe a woman’s mink coat for “cleaning,” impersonating a Secret Service agent and repeatedly violating probation.

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Doyle has [also] spent time in prison for stealing a bronze Degas sculpture by posing as a member of an art-collecting family, pilfering books from the art library at the University of Kansas, and filching jewelry from a Tennessee woman.

Cantor fled from protestors at the University of Pennsylvania, but gave the speech at UD‘s college, Northwestern. After the speech he was rapidly moved out via the back of the building by security guards (too many protestors out front).

As to the substance of the speech:

“We should want all people to be moving up and no one to be pulled down,” Cantor concludes. Well, yes, we should want that to happen, because wanting people to fail isn’t very nice. But unless we all live in Lake Wobegon (where the children are all “above average”) uniform upward mobility isn’t actually possible. The thing about mobility is that people have to move up and people have to move down.

Cantor’s income inequality solution is to elevate all of the bottom 99 percent in incomes up to the top 1 percent. That would shut up the Occupy Wall Street crowd for sure! A more practical solution–and one that doesn’t violate the laws of mathematics–would be to encourage mobility, by all means (the U.S. has actually fallen behind most of western Europe in this regard) but also to pay close attention to what happens to the people who don’t make it to the top. The bottom 99 percent contribute to prosperity too, and lately they haven’t had much to show for it. Cantor seems not in the slightest bit curious as to how that happened.

Yet another generous insider trader causes a bit of embarrassment for an institution he endowed.

His lawyer says that systematically robbing the system by taking advantage of a position of trust is “in no way indicative of [the] overall character” of Donald Johnson. But heck. I dunno.

Q: What is the overarching theme in all of your books, and philosophy about life?

A: Happiness. I can define it in a thousand different ways. I knew if I could talk about happiness, then everything else would fall into place. When I tried to write about this 10 years ago, publishers turned me down. I was so ahead of my time.

… Anna Nicole, based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith:

[Can] a piece that celebrates the vacuity of contemporary American life – and to a depressing extent, our own – …rise above vacuity itself?