Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That’s the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

—Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math | Politics News | Rolling Stone

a period of exclusive control by a literary estate after an author’s death creates the opportunity, and the financial incentive, to assemble fully prepared editions, made by specialists often informed by the author’s instructions. Once work enters the public domain, it can be published by anyone in any form, and the financing of editions requiring editorial care becomes, once again, at the pleasure of benevolent institutions rather than readers.

—Google & Books: An Exchange by Edward Mendelson, Paul N. Courant, and Ann Kjellberg | The New York Review of Books

Bill Maher was one of the few prominent voices to call his comrades out. “If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something,” he said. He went on to point out the towering naïveté of their nonpartisan approach, with its bogus attempt to equate the insanity of left and right: “Martin Luther King spoke on that mall in the capital and he didn’t say, ‘Remember folks, those Southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point too!’ No. He said, ‘I have a dream. They have a nightmare!’ … Liberals like the ones on that field must stand up and be counted and not pretend that we’re as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit as they are, and if that’s too polarizing for you and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.”

—The Joke’s on You | Steve Almond | The Baffler

By contrast, consider the late Bill Hicks, a stand-up comedian of the same approximate vintage as Stewart and Colbert. “You never see my attitude in the press,” Hicks once observed. “For instance, gays in the military… . Gays who want to be in the military. Here’s how I feel about it, alright? Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in. End of fucking story. That should be the only requirement. I don’t care how many pushups you can do. Put on a helmet, go wait in that foxhole, we’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody… . I watched these fucking congressional hearings and all these military guys and the pundits, ‘Seriously, aww, the esprit de corps will be affected, and we are such a moral’—excuse me! Aren’t y’all fucking hired killers? Shut up! You are thugs and when we need you to go blow the fuck out of a nation of little brown people, we’ll let you know… . I don’t want any gay people hanging around me while I’m killing kids!”

—The Joke’s on You | Steve Almond | The Baffler

In a sense, Rice owed Stewart an even larger debt. His criticism of the Iraq war—a series of reports under the banner Mess O’Potamia—might have done more to diffuse the antiwar movement than the phone surveillance clauses embedded in the Patriot Act. Why take to the streets when Stewart and Colbert are on the case? It’s a lot easier, and more fun, to experience the war as a passive form of entertainment than as a source of moral distress requiring citizen activism.

—The Joke’s on You | Steve Almond | The Baffler

Now Eggers has a new mission: He wants to take over a mid-Market building near Twitter’s humming HQ and turn it into a showcase for artisans and craftspeople. He envisions a space filled with more than 100 producers of handmade wares, including shoes, skateboards, guitars, and clocks. “Things you can touch and hold,” he says. “I like the idea of having a place for the makers of physical things, as a hedge against a technology-only downtown corridor. The more we go digital, the more we hunger to get back in touch with real things and how they’re made.”

—Dave Eggers on countering the digital trend with a project focused on physical craft. How Much Tech Can One City Take? | Modern Luxury

Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

—The Joke’s on You | Steve Almond | The Baffler

CAGE: I like the Marcel Duchamp directive. The way he expressed it, if I can remember correctly, is “To reach the impossibility of transferring from one like image to another the memory imprint.” In other words, to come to the point of living like a tourist.

—John Cage on experiencing life, and thus art, in the present, from an interview with Brian Eno. Musician: A Meeting Of Sound Minds

Well, you don’t really teach it; you try to understand it. And you try to understand it from the outside in. You need to try and understand it from a distance, from as far away as possible. You have to kind of take a Zen, Eastern approach. You know, what I mean by that is a Western approach would be, like, you walk up to a flower and you wanna try to understand it, the Western approach would be to cut up the flower. The Eastern approach would be, like, “Let’s just try to observe the flower and see if we can understand about the flower using all our senses and observation and try to be with the flower. Let’s just stop being ourselves for a minute—after we observe it and everything, let’s see if we can divorce ourselves from ourselves and be with the flower.” It’s like going up and hugging the tree. But to hug a tree successfully, one has to lose one’s self to see if you can actually feel the tree. Can you really feel anything happening in the bark, in your touch? Are you experiencing anything after you get out of yourself in the tree?

—Henry Threadgill Unedited on teaching a style of creative improvisation such as that by Cecil Taylor.

That’s really the way to read the issues of the Quarterly. Not to try reading the latest one straight through, but order a few back issues from its website, Laphamsquarterly.org, and put them on your bedside table. Each page is an illumination of the consciousness, the culture that created you, and that is waiting to recreate you.

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Lewis Lapham’s Antidote to the Age of BuzzFeed | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine

Lapham speaks the truth: the Quarterly is a perfect bedside-table or idle-plane-waiting companion.