Word: dying
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...ever. In Infinite Jest a corporation-run unified North America of the near-future (dates have been replaced by sponsor names, such as the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) is being decimated by a videotape so entertaining that people watch it on a loop, mesmerized until they die of dehydration or starvation or lack of sleep. Reading it, you realize how soul-sad lonely you are. And Wallace creates that effect, like Pynchon, while being laugh-out-loud funny...
...boiling water, you are cold-blooded murderer when you eat it. In the 150th anniversary issue of The Atlantic last year, he nihilistically stated an unpopular truth about liberty: The cost of freedom is that you have to occasionally let 3,000 people die in terrorist attacks. His 1999 collection of short stories, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men - which John Krasinski has adapted into a movie to be released later this year - damns his gender as a greedy, cold, oversexed marauders...
Russian novelist and dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died last month at the age of 89. A celebrated author, his series of novels—including his most renowned, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”—meticulously documented the monstrous crimes of Stalin’s regime and eventually won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. The effusive stream of eulogies that poured in from across the world and the political spectrum might lead us to think that Solzhenitsyn ranks with George Orwell as one of the century?...
...Russell Gewirtz (Inside Man), actually has an idea that hasn't been truncheoned to death in a zillion other movies: What if a cop were a serial killer? A peace officer certainly has motive, means and opportunity to knock off a dozen or so malefactors who probably deserve to die but have escaped conviction. The cop could truly believe that killing them is nothing less than righteous. He might think of himself as De Niro's Travis Bickle did in Taxi Driver, using his gun to wash the New York streets clean of their wretched refuse. And at the beginning...
...free me and tens of millions like me from the hamster's treadmill," he says. Rubens ties mindless ambition in the U.S. to major depression, addiction, personal and public debt and even the popularity of American Idol. "Unless we change our nation's culture," he cautions, "we will die alone and unhappy with our basalt countertops, Sub-Zero wine storage and massive credit-card debt." Wait--is that...