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Beyond Austin

Beyond Austin

Ali

June 5, 2016

Muhammad Ali was of a time, and remembering that time is required to understand the reaction to his departure from this Earthly vale. Few people have told Ali’s story better than David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who wrote a whole book on Ali some years back. If you want to know more about Ali, this long form obituary from Remnick is a good use of your time. Appetizer:

What a loss to suffer, even if for years you knew it was coming. Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, in Phoenix, at the age of seventy-four, was the most fantastical American figure of his era, a self-invented character of such physical wit, political defiance, global fame, and sheer originality that no novelist you might name would dare conceive him. Born Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville, Kentucky, he was a skinny, quick-witted kid, the son of a sign painter and a house cleaner, who learned to box at the age of twelve to avenge the indignity of a stolen bicycle, a sixty-dollar red Schwinn that he could not bear to lose. Eventually, Ali became arguably the most famous person on the planet, known as a supreme athlete, an uncanny blend of power, improvisation, and velocity; a master of rhyming prediction and derision; an exemplar and symbol of racial pride; a fighter, a draft resister, an acolyte, a preacher, a separatist, an integrationist, a comedian, an actor, a dancer, a butterfly, a bee, a figure of immense courage.

But do read the whole thing.

Beyond Austin

A couple of pictures of Chicago

June 3, 2016

We are in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the huge gathering of everybody who is anybody in oncology. In fact, we are nobody and yet we are here. Anyway, we took a few pictures during the day.

A selfie:

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And an artistic Trump shot, if you can believe it.

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Beyond Austin

With friends like these (Bernie edition)

June 2, 2016


We’re going to go out on a limb and say that the chattering classes will mock this endorsement less than, say, North Korea’s endorsement of Donald Trump. Regardless, Venezuela has misery, and therefore wants company. What other motivation could it have?