“It’s impossible to get an education now without going underground,” said Oleksandr Lagin, 39, a grocery store manager whose two sons study below ground for safety against drones and missiles, in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.
“Today is not the beginning of the end for social media, any more than 1998 was the beginning of the end of Big Tobacco,” said Robert Proctor, a Stanford professor and the author of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. “Americans still smoke more than 170 billion cigarettes every year, and inhale tons of additional nicotine from ‘electronic’ variants. How easily we forget!” (New York Times, September 2)
* * * * *
“The strategy [in Iran, after six months] has been rinse and repeat, whether it’s rhetorical or kinetic action,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former State Department appointee in the first Trump administration. “It’s been absolutely shocking how the United States has been exposed for a lack of a plan of engagement, and a lack of a plan to either win or exit this war.”
“This, what the settlers are doing here [in the West Bank], is the real threat to Israel,” said retired Maj. Gen. Eyal Ben-Reuven, who has spent his life fighting for Israel. This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.”
“My mother believed that a North Atlantic summer was one of the most magical gifts in life,” Caroline Kennedy wrote in a 2019 letter to the Vineyard Gazette. (New York Times, September 3)
* * * * *
“When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,” Gloria Steinem often said. “It was just called life.”
“It’s a question of how much pain can Russia take compared to Ukraine — and Russia can take a lot of pain,” said Rob Lee, a military expert at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute who travels frequently to the front line. (New York Times, September 4)
* * * * *
“I don’t think [the Russians] want a third world war, but they have to demonstrate to everyone that it is not the time to mess with them,” said Piotr Krawczyk, the former director of Poland’s foreign intelligence service, after the German government revealed a failed Russian sabotage attempt in Germany.
“By the time your grandmother starts using 🥀 (the wilting rose emoji), it’s done, you’ve got to move on,”said Adam Aleksic, 25, a linguist who posts as Etymology Nerd online.
“I speak to my family, but not often,” said Edna Workman, a 32-year-old transgender woman and drag queen in Atlanta who performs as Edna Allan Hoe. “But they did text me when Dolly Parton died.” (New York Times, September 5)
* * * * *
“To me, Route 66 is not simply a road,” Roberto Rossi, who runs a Route 66 Association in Italy, wrote in an email. “It is a family that begins in Chicago and ends at the Santa Monica Pier.” (New York Times, September 6)
* * * * *
“On a daily basis, I am embarrassed by seeing visitors from the neighborhood and around the world turned away at the gates of a university I love,” said Toby Golick, the lawyer representing the parties in the lawsuit, and a Columbia alumnus. “I am very pleased that New York City has now — as it did when it first gave a public street to Columbia to create College Walk — agreed with us that the gates should be reopened to the public.” (New York Times, September 7)
* * * * *
"From the top down, Trump is replacing the highly imperfect meritocracy of American public service with an idiocracy, and his corrupt idiocrats are creating profound short-, medium- and long-term harms to American national security," writes opinion columnist David French, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. (New York Times, September 8)
* * * * *
“His retirement is a profound loss for those who care about America’s history, not its fantasy,” Ava DuVernay said in a statement about the retirement of Lonnie Bunch III as the Smithsonian's secretary and founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “He’s been treated shamefully by people who seem more interested in controlling America’s history than understanding it.” (New York Times, September 10)
* * * * *
“[Prime Minister Mark] Carney is as much a prisoner of public opinion now as he is a leader of it,” said Andrew McDougall, an assistant professor of Canadian politics at the University of Toronto. “Public opinion right now is so inflamed that anything that looks like a concession or a walk back means that he’s going to get destroyed in the public eye.”
“This is the capital of the world in many senses,” said Gustavo Dudamel, the new music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic. “We have here thousands of possibilities. There are thousands of things — thousands of goals — we can achieve, but we have to be very flexible, very open, to create this story. To evolve the tradition. Not to go back.”
"Irony survived Sept. 11, but the idea that a tragedy could startle everyone into earnest seriousness did not," writes Jason Zinoman, a comedy columnist. "That is the age that actually came to an end." (New York Times, September 11)
* * * * *
“Nobody should ever suggest that they represent the single opinion of any group of Jews anywhere,” said Rabbi Jeremy Gordon, who published a letter on Wednesday supporting United Kingdom sanctions against Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and detailing his own experiences with settlers. (New York Times, September 12)
* * * * *
“The discussion [about the dangers AI poses] has a frame, and it is a very particular frame. That is the frame that was there before deep learning took off, and it has stayed there,” Branton DeMoss, an A.I. researcher at Oxford, said, referring to the rise of neural networks. “And I don’t agree with it.”
“If these chandeliers could talk, they would tell you that they saw Barbra Streisand dancing and singing her way around the main floor of the store,” said Linda Fargo, an executive at Bergdorf Goodman, now celebrating 125 years in business. “They would say that they saw Madonna reading her book to children sitting on the floor of the jewelry department.” (New York Times, September 13)
* * * * *
“Gerrymandering breaks things,” said Emma Petty Addams, the co-executive director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government. “It physically fractures communities. It breaks trust. If you look at the political situation and never see a chance to have someone that represents you, you lose faith in representative government.”
“I think that my entire motivation and execution and philosophy can be two words: ‘Hey, look,’” said photographer Jay Maisel in a documentary about his work. (New York Times, September 14)
* * * * *
“I understand we cross so many red lines in this war, but how in the world can hitting a passenger train be even accepted as something that is not immediately seen as a war crime?” said Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, the chief executive of the national Ukraine Railways. “A passenger train is not different from a passenger airplane, especially in the country that has no airspace open.”
“You can mention some of the greatest names in fashion, and the average person won’t be able to conjure up, for example, a Giorgio Armani suit, said Frank DeCaro, the author of Unmistakably Mackie: The Fashion and Fantasy of Bob Mackie. But if you say to an American of a certain age, ‘What is a Bob Mackie?,’ they know exactly what you’re talking about.” (New York Times, September 15)
* * * * *
“For a large number of years, Australians asked whether an E.V. could take them far enough, but the fuel crisis has basically prompted another question: How exposed do I want to be to the next global oil shock?” said Hussein Dia, a professor of transport technology at Swinburne University in Melbourne. (New York Times, September 16)
* * * * *
“It’s almost like sex ed,” said Anita Sarma, a professor of computer science at Oregon State who has studied the impact of A.I. on student cognition. “They will do it anyway,” she said. “How do we teach them responsible use?” (New York Times, September 17)
* * * * *
“The war in Iraq really changed everything because it made Iran a much bigger part of the equation,” said Stéphane Lacroix, an associate professor at Sciences Po in Paris who focuses on contemporary Islam. “It opened the way for this kind of Iranian expansionism, this much greater Iranian influence across the region.”
“You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to,” a Chat GPT A.I. model wrote. “You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit.” (New York Times, September 18)
* * * * *
“When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself,” writes philosopher Susan Neiman in Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. “It’s already been mistaken for rationality.” (New York Times, September 19)
* * * * *
“It’s like me bulldozing right through the Arlington Cemetery,” said Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, who objects to the construction of a border wall that would divide tribal lands which include Mexican territory. “We don’t matter to the U.S. government. They want to erase us. They want to take our land, they want to desecrate it, they want to hit us where it hurts.” (New York Times, September 20)
* * * * *
“Novels draw you into human conflicts the way our brains are wired to experience them—as feelings, and there’s a big difference between information and feeling," said Barbara Kingsolver, best-selling author of Demon Copperhead. "We enter into the realities of other people through emotion, not information, and that’s what a great novel does.” (The New Yorker, September 21)
* * * * *
“If there is one threat that keeps me up at night, it is from drones,” said Jessica Tisch, NYPD commissioner, during a news conference in May as the city was preparing for the World Cup. “Commercial drones can be easily adapted into weapons of war. That reality matters in New York City.”
“A lot of us have found ourselves retreating into nostalgia at just this moment because we’re living in such a dark world," said musician Marc Almond of Soft Cell, whose final album is titled "Danceteria," also the name of a track on Madonna's latest release. "The past is where we feel comfortable.” (New York Times, September 22)
* * * * *
“I think now this is Xi Jinping’s world and we’re all living in it,” said Scott Kennedy, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“Unlike A.I., climate change’s existential threat is not hypothetical. It is killing people now,” Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote last week. “It also feels like a lot of people have conveniently forgotten about the urgency of solving this problem.”
“As far as I know, there is no precedent either for a president to ban cameras or networks — or for networks to boycott an event in solidarity with their banned colleagues,” said Harold Holzer, the author of The Presidents vs. the Press. "I was waiting for that to happen but honestly despaired of it. Thrilled to see it.” (New York Times, September 23)
* * * * *
“To the King’s supporters it [Swan Song: Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer] is an act of revenge served so cold it comes with a layer of permafrost,” Rebecca English wrote in The Daily Mail. “While there has been little love lost between the House of Windsor and the Spencers over the decades, few predicted a hatchet-job of such deliberate spite.” (New York Times, September 24)
* * * * *
“Going to an art fair is like a kid walking in on their parents having sex,” said artist John Baldessari. “You know it happens, you just never want to see it.” (New York Times, September 25)
* * * * *
“Trump has increasingly collapsed the vast challenge of U.S.-China relations into the narrow question of his personal relationship with Xi,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former China director for the National Security Council in the Biden administration and now a research scholar at Columbia University. “He seems either unaware of or unconcerned by Beijing’s effort to turn today’s stabilization into tomorrow’s constraints on U.S. policy.”
“The mayor stands for everything that is the opposite of elite,” said Peter Gelb, the New York Metropolitan Opera’s general manager. “Having the mayor, who is one of the most popular individuals on the planet right now, actively engaged with the Met can only be beneficial.” (New York Times, September 26)
* * * * *
“[Rahm Emanuel is] like the political equivalent of Windows 95 — an operating system without an application in the modern era,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, a progressive group. “I don’t know what counsel he has to offer people who are running in competitive elections in 2026.”
“Talking to Rahm, it’s like middle-age married sex,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who has known him for decades. “It’s focused. You know what you’re going for. And it’s short.” (New York Times, September 27)
* * * * *
“I get that everyone is invested in Mamdani being perfect, but that press conference [with the President] was pretty gross,” said Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark. (New York Times, September 28)
* * * * *
“What an idiotic war,” Andriy Kovalenko, a lieutenant in Ukraine’s military and a former government official, posted on social media after Russia hit the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv with a jet-powered drone, killing at least two people and injuring six.
“I know that there’s a tendency to say people are half something, half another,” said Mary Peltola, a Democratic Senate candidate from Alaska, whose mother is Native American and whose father is white. “But I always thought of it as double. I really had, you know, double the language, double the perspectives, really different perspectives, really different values, really different worldviews — but double. And I thought that was a huge advantage.” (New York Times, September 29)
* * * * *
“I like people who love to dance even more than want to be ballet dancers . . . Everybody loved her and not because she was showing off. It’s just that she so thoroughly enjoyed dancing that it just sprung out of her.”said Christopher Flynn, Madonna’s dance teacher and mentor, who died of AIDS in 1990. (New York Times, September 30)
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