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Showing posts from September 8, 2019

Review of Behemoth: the history of the factory and the making of the modern world

1. As a kid, I worked in my father’s ice factory. It was not a grandiose enterprise –   it consisted of an outer office, an inner office, a floor on which there were nine regular icemakers and one cube icemaker, and a freezer. Outside, in the pebble and dirt driveway, there were three ice delivery vans. The only employees were family. My mom, in the summer, my two brothers, from the time they were in the fifth grade, me, from the time I was in the seventh grade, and one summer my sister, who was the secretary. We hired a few of my friends from highschool for the high sales seasons of spring and summer, but this rarely worked out. They had a hard time getting a grip on the process of bagging ice. It was simple, but it needed a certain meditative agility. The ice makers were all gray shiny machines that delivered a load of ice every twenty minutes or so, which piled ice up in the bins. You didn’t want the ice to pile up completely, but sometimes it did. You took your ice scoop

Epstein

There’s a moment in that wild interview Stuart Pivar gave Mother Jones about his friend, Jeffrey Epstein.  Pivar was trying to give an idea of what he found “charming” about Epstein, as well as what he found sick about him. Pivar is an art dealer, among other things, and this is the anecdote he told:   Jeffrey had numerous residences. And he used to rely on me to help him furnish them with art. I was sort of his art consultant, you might say, not that he ever took my advice. Because he pretended to be interested in art, but he was really more interested with—Jeffrey was so perverse. “Perverse,” that word, haha. You have to use it. What is perversion? You want to examine that. Jeffrey was amused to have in his house fake art which looked like real art. Because of the fact that he was putting one over, so to speak. He thought that he was—how do you describe that? When you walked into this house, for example, there was a Max Weber or something like that, and it was a fake. And it am