Matthew Royal > Recent Status Updates

“Think what it means, for instance, to read Macbeth at sixteen in contrast to reading it at thirty-five. We can understand Macbeth as Shakespeare meant us to understand it only when we have had some experience, vicarious or otherwise, of marriage and ambition. To read great books, if we read them at all, in childhood and youth and never read them again is never to understand them."

“So Montesquieu said that as the principle of an aristocracy was honor, and the principle of a tyranny was fear, the principle of a democracy was education. Thomas Jefferson took him seriously. Now we discover that a little learning is a dangerous thing. We see now that we need more learning, more real learning, for everybody."

"The liberally educated man has a mind that can operate well in all fields."

Great story about the kidnapping of a Kdatlyno sculpter. Niven's universe of long-lived humans, aliens who see only radar wavelength, and a 1960s view of what's shocking about sex is an interesting, contained world.

It's a future where advanced technology brings about no thinking machines, and where humanity is never forced to evolve beyond cosmetic changes. These stories give a great feel for Niven.

"The Moscow Mule, invented in 1941 by a vodka distributor and a bartender to make use of the bartender's unsold ginger beer and to jump-start vodka sales. Apparently the bartender's girlfriend owned a company that manufactured copper mugs, so her product became part of the recipe, too."

Reading these stories is both sad and amusing.

Sad, because just 100 years ago when the steamship Yosemite exploded, newspapers reported only 7 deaths, and also 33 Chinese were pulled from the river. (Origin of the so-called "Chinese Cemetery" in Sacramento.) Turns out most of them were Japanese. #racist.

Funny, because many of these stories read like the script to "Drunk History." Local histories are great!

"Artichokes also play a well-known trick on the taste buds, temporarily suppressing taste receptors on the tongue that detect sweetness. The next thing that comes across the palate--a drink of water, a bite of food--tastes unusually sweet as those receptors start working again."

I've had half a dozen conversations with friends and strangers about things I've read in this book.

"Apples display 'extreme heterozygosity,' meaning that they produce offspring that look nothing like their parents. Plant an apple seed, wait a few decades, and you'll get a tree bearing fruit that looks and tastes entirely different from its parent. In fact, the fruit from one seedling will be, genetically speaking, unlike any other apple ever grown, at any time, anywhere in the world."

"If the system can’t function fairly, if the system can’t correct its own mistakes and admit that it makes mistakes and give people an opportunity to [correct] them, then the system is broken. —appellate lawyer Michael Charlton"

Great chapters on fake repressed memories and problems in criminal prosecution. The chapter on self justification in romantic relationships was not as useful.

"When we tell a story, we tend to leave ourselves out: My father did thus-and-such because of who he was, not because of the kind of kid I was. That’s the self-justification of memory. And it is why, when we learn that a memory is wrong, we feel stunned , disoriented, as if the ground under us has shifted. In a sense, it has. It has made us rethink our own role in the story."

"I admit that the black man is inferior. But what is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live; it is the torturing whip that lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the South, and the scarcely less cruel human bloodhounds of the north, who enforce the Fugitive Slave Law."