Sarah Wrote That

From Richard Blanco’s Inaugural Poem, “One Today”

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together

[via @IrisBlasi] [full text on NY Times]

"Arguments for guns in America are couched in terms of freedom—the right (freedom) to bear arms, the freedom from tyranny that bearing arms supposedly guarantees (though good luck with that in the era of the modern security state)—with gun regulation portrayed as a necessary constraint. I don’t know what to call the idea that at any moment you might have to kill someone to stay alive—Hobbesian, primeval—but I wouldn’t call it freedom or liberty."

- Guns In The Family by Sarah Malone (via therumpus)

From my piece up today on The Rumpus

"The city thinks like a developer; that vision thing, the long-term overview, the balance of private investment and public utility and amenity, is just not there. The disposition of public land is expedited on the developers’ terms even though the land is the most powerful negotiating tool of all […] It is accepted that whatever the plans are for these vast tracts of squandered opportunity, they will ultimately be controlled, compromised, or scuttled by the winner of the financial contest that is at the heart of the matter. New York will continue to sell itself short all the way to the bank."

- Ada Louise Huxtable, in The Wall Street Journal in January 2008 about the Hudson Yards proposal. She died today at 91. Her most recent piece for The Journal discussed the New York Public Library’s proposed renovations. I’ll greatly miss her humanism, historical and technical knowledge, wit, and fearlessness.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama embrace Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden moments after the television networks called the election in their favor, while watching election returns at the Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park in Chicago, Ill., Nov. 6, 2012.

[Flickr]

pauloctavious:

Downtown Chicago is the place to be!! #obama2012

The Second Thing That Scared Me Most In The Foreign Policy Debate

Scariest, or most urgently scary, was Romney’s utter disinterest in foreign affairs, and how little he’d prepared to disguise it, as though he thought it didn’t matter. His only moment of true verve seemed to come relating a conversation with a business owner, puzzling out the source of counterfeit valves.

When Bob Schieffer asked what the candidates considered the greatest future threat to American security, the obvious answer, to my mind, was climate change. Potential for new, unpredictable national imperatives, risks to infrastructure, threats to economic fundamentals, geographic flashpoints? But of course that, like so much else, was unsayable. Romney doesn’t admit climate change is real or in his purview, so Obama doesn’t even need to broach the topic.

Maybe after the election he’ll have, as he puts it, greater flexibility.

But in four years, when we have to go through all this again, will the GOP be any closer to admitting empirical evidence into its considerations? How long can we sustain a national sprint in which one party is fundamentally unsuited to running a twenty-first century country?

President Obama’s remarks to the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner
October 18, 2012

Khan: “I’ve given you no word to keep.”

This, of course, right before Kirk fires back.

[Star Trek II quotes on IMDB]