And bravo University of Washington students for en masse chasing out the local Nazi who pushed his way into their lecture hall and did a bunch of fascist shouts. The students surrounded him until the police showed up.
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You know. Where the children chase down the witch.
photo DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP
As England debates assisted dying, a charismatic couple in their late nineties decides they’ve had enough of “merely existing.” They went to Switzerland, although the friend quoted in my headline points out that if England had legalized assisted dying by now, they’d have been able to stay home and die among family and friends.
They sent a note to their loved ones:
Sorry not to have mentioned it, but when you receive this email we will have shuffled off this mortal coil. The decision was mutual and without any outside pressure. We had lived a long life together for almost 75 years. There came a point when failing senses, of sight and hearing and lack of energy was not living but existing that no care would improve.
We had an interesting and varied life, except for the sorrow of losing Jeremy, our son. We enjoyed our time together, we tried not to regret the past, live in the present and not to expect too much from the future. Much love Ruth & Mike.
… for the likes of Carlos Alcaraz and Yuja Wang.
… Tom Lehrer songs – every single one of them – so it’s hard for her to know which to feature here. But there’s one she sings more than all the others, so…
“Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one is mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for?” [Pete Buttigieg] said in a forum at the University of Chicago earlier this year. “Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of ‘Portlandia’? …. [This] is how Trump Republicans are made.”
Using his Kurdish connections, [Peter Galbraith] has helped get more than two dozen children of various nationalities out of [ISIS detention] camps… Over the course of a year, he made three trips to Syria to search [for two young boys]. On his third visit, in November 2022, camp officials brought [them] to meet him in a small office… After a DNA test proved their identities, the boys were transferred to an orphanage-like facility within the camps, where they were able to have weekly video calls with their grandparents in Minnesota.
They now live with their family in Minnesota. Their [repentant, cooperating] ISIS father will be in jail here for ten years.
Delaware becomes the twelfth state to legalize medical aid in dying.
66% of UD’s fellow Marylanders support the humane and unremarkable idea that dying people should have control over their deaths, as they had control over their lives. But people in her state legislature who think some notion of what God wants should prevail over what Marylanders want have so far blocked the legislation.
There seems to be some confidence that the legislation will, in not too long a time, pass in Maryland.
Let us defend the liberal democracy that, with all its limitations, continues to signify political pluralism, coexistence, tolerance, human rights, respect for criticism, legality, free elections, alternation in power, everything that has been taking us out of a savage life and bringing us closer – though we will never attain it – to the beautiful, perfect life literature devises, the one we can deserve only by inventing, writing, and reading it…
Not only has he pledged to reduce taxes for each individual Pole by three hundred percent; he has also promised to rename the Pacific Ocean the Polish Ocean.
Lee Grodzins, MIT professor, lived one of the great lives. Read the whole thing.
He got his favorite student evaluation … for a course, billed as offering a “superficial overview” of nuclear physics. The comment read: “This physics course was not superficial enough for me.”
… Early on, he joined several Manhattan Project alums at MIT in their concern about the consequences of nuclear bombs. In Vietnam-era 1969, Grodzins co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists, which calls for scientific research to be directed away from military technologies and toward solving pressing environmental and social problems.
… In 1999, Grodzins founded the nonprofit Cornerstones in Science, a public library initiative to improve public engagement with science. Based originally at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, Cornerstones now partners with libraries in Maine, Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and California. Among their initiatives was one that has helped supply telescopes to libraries and astronomy clubs around the country.
photo markus schreiber
UD will always admire the monologue he gave Fulvia Morgana, the way-rich, sybaritic Italian Marxist in Small World:
Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ‘istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role which we know ‘ow to perform with a certain dignity.
