What Does He See in Himself? - Battlelines by Tony Abbott
'Battlelines' starts off in promising fashion, with an account of the “24-hour media frenzy” that Abbott endured in 2005, when it was revealed that he had a long-lost illegitimate son. It later turned out that the child wasn’t really Abbott’s, but the facts of the case remain instructive. The conception, so Abbott believed, had occurred in 1976, when he was nineteen, during a period when “a part of me said that I should join the priesthood,” but when a less pious portion of him disagreed. Accordingly, Abbott and his then girlfriend were in the habit of playing “what used to be called Vatican roulette.” I call this a promising start because I was foolish enough to believe, for a page or two, that Abbott was revisiting the whole mess in a spirit of serious self-examination.
Clean Hands Give No Comfort - Frontline Photography
Red Cross personnel are the foot-soldiers of the Geneva Convention - countries who subscribe to the conventions also financially sustain the organization. But even this fairly desirable arrangement – a neutral body funded by numerous different countries and corporate bodies to impartially administer aid across the globe – is ethically fraught.
I Was a Teenage Child-Killer - Thrill Me
Leopold and Loeb have taken their place as exemplary figures in the tradition of deluded would-be-ubermenschen. When Raskolnikov axed a pawnbroker, it was with the firm intention of doing boundless good with the fortune he would build out of that first stolen handful. Leopold and Loeb simply wanted to know what a person thinks about after they’ve killed someone.
Writing is Hell - The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 4
“I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive,” says Philip Roth. One of the general messages of the Paris Review interviews is that even the best writers find writing a wickedly hard business. This may be why a lot of reviewers like and recommend the books. Reviewers are writers too, and these books can make a writer feel less alone.