Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
DS: How has teaching helped you as a writer? GS: I just like being around our students. There’s something very heartening about teaching, in a “There’s nothing new under the sun” way: You realize that there have always been, and will always be, young artistic people in the world who, being relatively new to the world, are freshly amazed by its beauty. And it’s so nice to be around that energy. Our students are incredibly smart and talented—this year we got 566 applications at Syracuse, for six spots. They love fiction and are charged-up about it and hopeful for its future, and their enthusiasm rubs off on me. It also helps my writing in a more direct way, I think. There’s something wonderful about spending a day taking apart a Tolstoy story to see how it works, and then getting up the next morning, feeling like: Okay, I’m still alive, still writing, still part of this lineage—and therefore there’s still a chance that, one day, I’ll do something good. That feeling comes directly out of the fresh immersion in a great work that one constantly gets when teaching.
Tenth of December
George Saunders
After years of hearing my father rant at my flaws, one loss has caused me to take up his rant. I’ve internalized my father—his impatience, his perfectionism, his rage—until his voice doesn’t just feel like my own, it is my own. I no longer need my father to torture me. From this day on, I can do it all by myself.
When the Trump administration came to power, the chairman of the PCAOB, James Doty, was in the middle of trying to negotiate a new arrangement with Beijing. But Doty was removed in 2018 by Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Jay Clayton, who was chosen by Mnuchin. Clayton was also a legal adviser to Alibaba. As he had so many times before, Trump’s pro-business Treasury secretary had effectively short-circuited America’s response to China’s economic aggression. The massive fraud and corruption these practices allowed eventually became well known enough that a cottage industry of short sellers cropped up. By simply performing basic research on these companies, firms like Muddy Waters Research were able to expose fraud after fraud. They were featured in a 2018 documentary called The China Hustle, which chronicled the efforts of Wall Street whistleblowers to call attention to the huge scope and scale of the probtem. But as so often happened, when China’s economic aggression was exposed, it simply changed its tactics.
Chaos Under Heaven
Josh Rogin
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise