The Astonishing Rise of Angela Merkel. By George Packer at The New Yorker
John Kornblum, a former U.S. Ambassador to Germany, who still lives in Berlin, said, “If you cross her, you end up dead. There’s nothing cushy about her. There’s a whole list of alpha males who thought they would get her out of the way, and they’re all now in other walks of life.” On Merkel’s fiftieth birthday, in 2004, a conservative politician named Michael Glos published a tribute:
Careful: unpretentiousness can be a weapon! … One of the secrets of the success of Angela Merkel is that she knows how to deal with vain men. She knows you shoot a mountain cock best when it’s courting a hen. Angela Merkel is a patient hunter of courting mountain cocks. With the patience of an angel, she waits for her moment.
German politics was entering a new era. As the country became more “normal,” it no longer needed domineering father figures as leaders. “Merkel was lucky to live in a period when macho was in decline,” Ulrich said. “The men didn’t notice and she did. She didn’t have to fight them—it was an aikido politics.” Ulrich added, “If she knows anything, she knows her macho. She has them for her cereal.”
My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK By Kiese Laymon at Gawker.
The fourth time a Poughkeepsie police officer told me that my Vassar College Faculty ID could make everything OK was three years ago on Hooker Avenue. When the white police officer, whose head was way too small for his neck, asked if my truck was stolen, I laughed, said no, and shamefully showed him my license and my ID, just like Lanre Akinsiku. The ID, which ensures that I can spend the rest of my life in a lush state park with fat fearless squirrels, surrounded by enlightened white folks who love talking about Jon Stewart, Obama, and civility, has been washed so many times it doesn’t lie flat.
After taking my license and ID back to his car, the police officer came to me with a ticket and two lessons. “Looks like you got a good thing going on over there at Vassar College,” he said. “You don’t wanna it ruin it by rolling through stop signs, do you?”
Love for My Enemies. An extraordiary tale, with video alternating with short stretches of connective-tissue prose, of reconciliation among the perpetrators and survivors of the Rwanda genocide. By Lukas Augustin and Niklas Schenck at The Atavist. Skip the latte, buy this instead. It will stick with you much longer.
When Wellars again asked Innocent to forgive him, in front of the group at Christophe’s workshop, Innocent gave him a hug and told him, “Let’s go to the bar and have a drink.” Step by step, Innocent had lost his anger toward Wellars. He had learned that Wellars had not planned the killings and had given back the land he stole during the genocide. He had also helped Innocent discover the identity of the man who had killed one of his brothers. Over time, something deeper evolved: The two men became friends again. When Innocent’s wife fell ill, Wellars bought her medicine. When Wellars moved houses, Innocent helped him. When one has money, he buys Fanta—or, at night, beers—for both. “Before the genocide, our friendship was about childhood,” Innocent says. “Now it is more focused, it is stronger. I can call upon him when I am in trouble.”
The Strand: The business model that’s kept the NYC bookstore up and running despite the threat of Amazon and e-books. By Christopher Bononas at Slate.
Until [2003], the Strand had been a beloved, indispensable, and physically grim place. Like a lot of businesses that had hung on through the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD years, it looked broken-down and patched-up. The bathroom was even dirtier than the one in the Astor Place subway. You got the feeling that a lot of books had been on the shelves for years. The ceiling was dark with the exhalations from a million Chesterfields. There were mice. People arriving with review copies to sell received an escort to the basement after a guard’s bellow: “Books to go down!” It was an experience that, once you adjusted to its sourness, you might appreciate and even enjoy. Maybe.
That New York is mostly gone, replaced by a cleaner and more efficient city—not to mention a cleaner and more efficient Strand. “Books to go down!” is extinct. So is Book Row, the Fourth Avenue strip that fortified the readers and writers of Greenwich Village. Though there are signs of life in the independent-bookseller business—consider the success of McNally-Jackson—few secondhand-book stores are left in Manhattan. Only two survive in midtown, and the necrology is long. Skyline on West 18th Street, New York Bound Bookshop in Rockefeller Center, the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th—closed. Academy Books is now Academy Records & CDs.
So, then: Why is there still a Strand Book Store?
Top-down causation and the emergence of agency. By Kevin Mitchell at Wiring the Brain.
Causes of behaviour can be described both at the level of mechanisms and at the level of reasons. There is no conflict between those two levels of explanation nor is one privileged over the other – both are active at the same time. Discussion of meaning does not imply some mystical or supernatural force that over-rides physical causation. It’s not that non-physical stuff pushes physical stuff around in some dualist dance. (After all, “non-physical stuff” is a contradiction in terms). It’s that the higher-order organisation of physical stuff – which has both informational content and meaning for the organism – constrains and directs how physical stuff moves, because it is directed towards a purpose.
