Editors From The United States

"Incidentally, why is it that drug abuse is always described as an 'experiment', as if some important scientific enterprise were at stake instead of hedonistic self-indulgence?"

"You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence."

"The notion that some works are better and more important than others; that some works exert a special claim on our attention; that "being educated" requires a thoughtful acquaintance with these works and an ability to discriminate between greater and lesser-all this is anathema to the forces arrayed against the traditional understanding of the humanities. The very idea that the works of Shakespeare (for example) might be indisputably greater than the collected cartoons of Bugs Bunny is often rejected as "antidemocratic" and "elitist," an imposition on the freedom and political interests of various groups."

"The institutionalization of the Beat ethic has been a moral, aesthetic, and intellectual disaster of the first order. (It has also been a disaster for fashion and manners, but that is a separate subject.) We owe to the 1960s the ultimate institutionalization of immoralist radicalism: the institutionalization of drugs, pseudo-spirituality, promiscuous sex, virulent anti-Americanism, naive anti-capitalism, and the precipitous decline of artistic and intellectual standards. But the1960s and 1970s only codified and extended into the middle class the radical spirit of the Beats, who, in more normal times, would have remained what they were in the beginning; members of a fringe movement that provided stand-up comics with material."

"The Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?"

"Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank - or to blame."

"The institutionalization of the radical ethos in the academy has brought with it not only an increasing politicization of the humanities, but also an increasing ignorance of the humanistic legacy. Instead of reading the great works of the past, students watch movies, pronounce on the depredations of patriarchal society, or peruse second- or third-rate works dear to their ideological cohort; instead of reading widely among primary texts, they absorb abstruse commentaries on commentaries, resorting to primary texts only to furnish illustrations for their pet critical "theory." Since many older professors have themselves been the beneficiaries of the kind of traditional education they have rejected and are denying their students, it is the students who are the real losers in this fiasco."

"Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that 'liberated them from all restraints' and allowed them to experience every impulse as a 'divine command'. What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they 'conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities'. Podhoretz added, 'It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life'. Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an 'expanded consciousness', the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery."

"The Beats, like their successors in the Sixties, have often been described as 'idealists'. But fantasies of total gratification are not the product of idealism. They arise from a narcissism that, finding the world unequal to its desires, retreats into a realm of heedless self-absorption. Modesty, convention, and self-restraint then appear as the enemies rather than as the allies of humanity. In this sense, the Beat generation marks a step away from civilization."

"In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause."

"As with most revolutions, the counterculture's call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control. The phenomenon of 'political correctness', with its speech codes and other efforts to enforce ideological conformity, was one predictable result of this transformation. What began at the University of California at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement (called by some the 'Filthy Speech Movement'} soon degenerated into an effort to abridge freedom by dictating what could and could not be said about any number of politically sensitive issues."

"We - the industrialized, technologized world - have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'."

"And let’s not forget “Dane-Geld”: It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say: “Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away.” And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane."

"Some people regard the astonishing collapse of manners and civility in our society as a superficial event. They are wrong. The fate of decorum expresses the fate of a culture’s dignity, its attitude toward its animating values."

"The Beats are crucial to an understanding of America's cultural revolution not least because in their lives, their proclamations, and (for lack of a more accurate term) their 'work' they anticipated so many of the pathologies of the Sixties and Seventies. Their programmatic anti-Americanism, their avid celebration of drug abuse, their squalid, promiscuous sex lives, their pseudo-spirituality, their attack on rationality and their degradation of intellectual standards, their aggressive narcissism and juvenile political posturing: in all this and more, the Beats were every bit as 'advanced' as any Sixties radical."

""History,” Bagehot wrote, “is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”"

"Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, 'We'll get you through your children!' For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true."

"The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions."

"If the politicization of art and education represents one large part of the counterculture's legacy, the coarsening of feeling and sensibility is another. No phenomenon has done more to advance this coarsening than rock music. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of rock music to the agenda of the cultural revolution. It is also impossible to overstate its soul-deadening destructiveness. The most reviled part of Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind was his chapter criticizing the effects of rock. But Bloom was right in insisting that rock music is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. The triumph of rock was not only an aesthetic disaster of giant proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive."

"What is not possible is to combine the pursuit of pleasure and the enjoyment of comfort with the characteristic pleasures of a strong mind. If you wish for luxury, you must not nourish the inquisitive instinct."

"Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life."

"What can we unlock from the libraries? What can we make accessible? We’re getting to define who belongs in the greater canon of knowledge. Here we are, a bunch of people on the internet, redesigning the canon."

"My interests are maybe not the most ordinary, but I have them, and I follow them."

"You don’t get numbers like mine without being a bit obsessive. I probably edit a bit more when I should be cleaning my room."

"I’m not sure I believed the ‘anyone can edit’ part of it until I became part of 'everyone'."

"Who belongs in the encyclopedia? Who has a seat at the table? We’re figuring these questions out as we’re going, but we’re doing it in such a way that it becomes available to the rest of the world...It’s incredible to me to think about that. That’s what academia should have been all along."

"The act of creating content is more codified than it was [when Wikipedia started] and I think ultimately it makes it less friendly for novice users. For the self-guided editor, it’s not as easy as it was for me."

"I have my moments, I think everyone does. But then I look back on some of the articles I’ve written […] and it feels good. That wonderful feeling of having made something useful. That’s what keeps me going, often as not."

"I feel like political engagement is something that people, if they’re so inclined, all people should do...It’s not something that’s just for special, branded activists. It’s in part being a citizen."

"The Jewish heritage that resonates the most with me is our history as rebels and rootless cosmopolitans. Our history as the first white Freedom Riders who were murdered. Our history as dissident intellectuals like Hannah Arendt. Our skepticism, our nonalignment, all the things that made authoritarians throughout the world hate us so much."

"You take photos. Drawings you make. Cameras steal life force. Paintings, like The Picture of Dorian Gray, give you more."

"a brilliant illustrator, writer, and filmmaker"

"When the beer came Nick lifted and tilted the brown liquid in past the yellow foam. "Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse!" he said with a toss of his head. That was something he had picked up somewhere and he'd say it all the time now. Always with a cocky toss of his head."

"Drawing is disruptive. You're producing when you're expected to consume."

"I started drawing when I was four. It fast became a way to relate to a world where classmates wrote death threats on my book bag. In grade school, I'd draw kids so they wouldn't hit me. Artists are courtiers more often than rebels. Painters survived the gulags by drawing criminals' kids. Being small and skilled, you learn to create little portals of escapism-to which the strong are as susceptible as anyone else."

"Women are looked at. But as an artist, I had permission to look back. Where the respectable avert their gaze, artists stare."

"Look at this vast, beautiful, crazy, fucked-up, gorgeous, horrifying world. How could you not be inspired by it?"

"I think one of the problems that Americans often have when we're thinking about the Middle East is that Americans often only see images of the Middle East that come from war. So Americans might not realize that there are actually hundreds of thousands of people living in Raqqa, just like normal people, and if you take that awareness away, then it becomes very easy "Oh, bomb them all.""

"I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own beds, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student, I was a brat — if I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself — but this hammering kids to fit into this system is horrific. It leads to a lot of kids being either medicalized or criminalized, and I think the message I would have to kids is just like, survive it. And then, once you're out of childhood, I mean, you're just so much freer."

"Unfortunately systemic racism seems to ripple through our social institutions and into our daily social interactions, whether in Congress or at a coffee shop down the street from the Capitol. [...] Systemically, we know that Black people compared to whites are more likely to attend schools with less funding per student, less likely to obtain a job because of our “Black-sounding” name or even when attending an Ivy League university, less likely to obtain a home loan (even when having the same credit score), have their homes appraised for equitable value, more likely to experience pregnancy complications and maternal mortality, and more likely to have contact with police and the criminal justice system. Systemic racism inhibits (rather than prohibits like in the past) people’s ability to actualize all aspects of the American Dream. This occurs even for highly-educated Black people with high incomes and no criminal record. In fact, research documents that white people with a criminal record are more likely to get called back for a job than Black people without one."

"Systemic racism is not simply a thing of the past. It is up close and personal in the present. Racism may be no more transparent in an institution with the least representative racial progress like the Senate. There have only been 11 Black senators in roughly 232 years. Clearly, the Senate is the exact space we need people with the courage to say the blunt, honest truth about our nation’s past and present. Only then can we actualize a future where systemic racism does not exist. It is imperative for a truth, reconciliation, and reparative process to commence. This starts with atoning for the enslavement of millions of Africans whose descendants continuously fall systemically behind, whether they end up being the lone Black Republican senator or a Black police officer who might have the power to pull him over. We must have the courage to speak truth to power and one of the places it starts is in Congress. “If not now, then when?”"

"This week, the former President, hoping to shift the imagery away from his imminent fingerprinting-and-mugshot session in Georgia, has declared it beneath his dignity to engage in a debate with his rivals in the race for the Republican nomination. Instead, he will subject himself to the feathery inquisition of Tucker Carlson on social media. Yet Trump, the unwise wise guy, will eventually face less kindly examiners. Although he has long enjoyed the sleazy glamour and cynical counsel supplied by mob-adjacent figures like Roy Cohn, his mentor in matters of conscience and the law, Trump has no code and shows no loyalty. Despite his mobster cosplay, in short, he lacks even a gangster’s sense of dignity. Carmine (the Snake) Persico, for all his many sins, would have found Trump unworthy of the |Cosa Nostra. Before the mafia's disintegration, a boss was obliged to help a fallen or legally entangled soldier. And yet Trump won’t even pay the legal bills of [[Rudy Giuliani|[Rudy] Giuliani]], his loyal sidekick. The most lasting image of Giuliani will not be of a valiant public servant inspiring a grieving city but of a cynical mook lying about stolen votes on Trump's behalf while rivulets of hair dye course down his cheek."

"My conversations at Autreat-some mediated by keyboards or other devices for augmenting communication-taught me more about the day-to-day realities of being autistic than reading a hundred case histories would. They also offered me the chance to be in the neurological minority for the first time in my life, which illuminated some of the challenges that autistic people face in a society not built for them, while disabusing me of pernicious stereotypes such as the idea that autistic people lack humor and creative imagination. After just four days in autismland, the mainstream world seemed like a constant sensory assault. The notion that the cure for the most disabling aspects of autism will never be found in a pill, but in supportive communities, is one that parents have been coming to on their own for generations."

"Two decades after the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), parents still routinely find themselves having to sue their local school boards to obtain an appropriate classroom placement for their son or daughter. Furthermore, very little of the money raised by advocacy organizations like Autism Speaks addresses the day-to-day needs of autistic people and their families. By focusing primarily on funding searches for potential causes and risk factors, these organizations reinforce the idea that autism is a historical anomaly-a distinctive problem of modern times that could be solved by a discovery that seems perpetually just around the corner. As the mainstream world had a long argument about vaccines, newly diagnosed adults were engaged in a very different conversation about the difficulties of navigating and surviving in a world not built for them. By sharing the stories of their lives, they discovered that many of the challenges they face daily are not "symptoms" of their autism, but hardships imposed by a society that refuses to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities as it does for people with physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness. A seemingly simple question began to formulate in my mind: After seventy years of research on autism, why do we still seem to know so little about it? To find the answer to that question for this book, I decided to start my reporting at the very beginning, even before Kanner's and Asperger's allegedly independent discoveries of autism in the 1940s. By taking nothing for granted, I learned that the standard time line of autism history-its creation myth, so to speak-is fundamentally flawed in ways that render autistic people in previous generations harder to see. Until these inaccuracies in the time line are corrected, they will continue to hamper our ability to make wise choices about the kinds of research and societal accommodations that would be most beneficial to autistic people and their families. One of the most promising developments since the publication of "The Geek Syndrome" has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions. Though the spectrum model of autism and the concept of neurodiversity are widely believed to be products of our postmodern world, they turn out to be very old ideas, proposed by Hans Asperger in his first public lecture on autism in 1938. The idea of neurodiversity has inspired the creation of a rapidly growing civil rights movement based on the simple idea that the most astute interpreters of autistic behavior are autistic people themselves rather than their parents or doctors. (p 15-6)"

"He has portrayed the remarkable shifting of attitudes toward autism and Asperger's over the past few decades. NeuroTribes is a sweeping and penetrating history of all this, presented with a rare sympathy and sensitivity. It is fascinating reading; it will change how you think of autism, and it belongs alongside the works of Temple Grandin and Clara Claiborne Park, on the bookshelf of anyone interested in autism and the workings of the human brain."

""The Geek Syndrome," was published in the December issue of Wired in 2001. The world was still reeling from the horror of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, but e-mail started pouring into my inbox even before the magazine officially hit the newsstands. I heard from parents who said that the article helped them feel less isolated from other parents facing the same challenges with their own children; from clinicians who saw the same dynamic at work in their own high-tech communities; and from readers who had been struggling in social situations for most of their lives without knowing why. This flood of responses was both inspiring and humbling...Years passed, and I still got e-mail about "The Geek Syndrome" nearly every week. As time went on, though, I became convinced that by focusing on the dynamics of autism in one highly specialized community, I had missed a larger and more important story. (p 10-12)"

"A wry saying popular in the autistic community, "If you meet one person with autism, you've met one person with autism," turns out to be true even for molecular biologists. (p 14)"

"One of the hardest things about having a child with autism, parents told me, was struggling to maintain hope in the face of dire predictions from doctors, school administrators, and other professionals who were supposed to be on their side. (p 9)"

"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction"

"I started working right away as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. They put me in the San Francisco bureau of the Journal, which was the bureau that covered technology, and my first beat was writing about Oracle, which was this big business software company, and about Larry Ellison, the CEO at the time of that company."