Russland er forbrytelse uten straff og straff uten forbrytelse tiår etter tiår

I løpet av året har jeg utallige ganger hørt folk uttale et ønske om at Putin måtte falle om og være død. Men om den russiske tyrannen plutselig går bort eller synker inn i koma, endrer ikke det grunnloven. Putins administrasjon har fått i stand en grunnlovsfestet livsforsikring for seg selv og en sikkerhet for den politiske arven sin.

“Alice, honey”, she said to me, towering over me, “I'm not done with you. In fact, I haven't even started with you.” She said she was still going to prove [J. Michael] Bailey had lied in his book. “I' m going to ruin your career.”

“I dropped out of graduate school because postmodernism was then coming into academia,” Craig explained to me, “and it didn't seem worthwhile to go through all of the hard work of science and present all the evidence, just to have it dismissed by [someone] saying, ‘Well, that's just your narrative.’”

‘I still can't sing,’ [John] Lydon says with evident pride. ‘My voice is an instrument of torture and that's good enough for me. I'm an expressionist.’ A Situationist? ‘Ooh, no, no, certainly not that. No poncey Left Bank politics from Paris for me.’

They are not very ideologically sound, the Quo, are they, readers? Their attitude to women (particularly ex-wives) is hardly New Man, they use words like ‘poof’ and ‘wop’ with no blink of realisation that it might give offence (though ‘wop’ is all right because Francis Rossi comes from an Italian ice-cream family).

Roger Waters is thought, by many, to be the gloomiest man in rock. The Wall was gloomy and his solo LPs, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (1984) and Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), were gloomy, and his latest work, Amused to Death, is frightfully gloomy. Waters’ voice drones along to warn us that: a) there’s a squaggly Jeff Beck guitar solo coming up any minute; b) everything is horrible, especially television, war, the entire universe and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Smash Hits would never be the functionary of '80s pop's massive and shiny PR machine. Why? Because of Tom Hibbert. (First question in Foreigner interview, January 1985: ‘Are you the most boring group in the world?’)

David Crosby had become a major hate figure since his bust-up with [Roger] McGuinn and since he had severely marred the otherwise fabulous Younger Than Yesterday album with his pompous song ‘Mind Gardens’, where the fat one had quoted Shakespeare and sounded very silly indeed.

Denne bok er tilegnet mennesket.

Etter at verkene til Foucault, Lacan, Derrida og Deleuze i årtier hadde vært avsindig overvurdert, var de nå plutselig blitt gjenstand for almen latterliggjørelse over hele verden. Imidlertid ble ikke deres plass umiddelbart fylt av noen ny filosofisk retning. Tvert imot ble alle intellektuelle innenfor de såkalte «humaniora» brakt i vanry: Det var ikke til å unngå at det var realvitenskapsmenn av alle kategorier som nå kom til makten.

Jeg vet godt at det kan se ut som fakta motsier meg, og jeg vet godt at islam – langt den dummeste og mest opplysningsfiendtlige av alle religioner – i dag ser ut til å vinne terreng, men det er bare et overflatisk overgangsfenomen, for på lang sikt er islam dødsdømt, det er enda sikrere enn at kristendommen er det.

De vil forhindre oss i å ha gruppesex og spise fåreost – for noen jævla nazister. Og sosialistene er med på det, de også. De er imot sauene fordi sauer er høyreorientert, mens ulver er venstreorientert.

Små skyer drev som spermklatter mellom furuene, det ville bli en strålende dag.

The growth of social media inspired the rise of a popularized version of the identity synthesis that transformed the ideas of serious thinkers into simplistic memes and slogans

He was out of it. He dug Hank Williams—how gross can you get?

Nei, for faen: Berlin.
Berlin.
Muren. Christiane F. Bowie og Iggy. Einstürzende Neubauten. Neon. Regn. Betong.

– Og hvilke fantastiske band har Norge produsert, om jeg tør spørre?
– Mye bra norsk, da.
– Som for eksempel?
– Garden of Delight. Holy Toy. De Press. Circus Modern. Babij Jar. The Cut. White Lord Jesus. For eksempel.
– Har jeg aldri hørt om.
– Det er fordi de ikke er Abba. De kommer ikke til deg, du må komme til dem.
– Du er ikke en punker, Kristian. Du er en snobb.
– Kan hende. Men jeg er i alle fall ikke svensk.

Tack vare bloggen, som jag inte kunde försörja mig på, fick jag jobb som programledare på MTV, i ett relationsprogram med låga tittarsiffror som hette Puss. Sedan dog bloggen. Inte min, men som fenomen. Så fixade Mickey så att jeg kunde börja blogga på portal hos en damtidning, för att mogna med min publik. Sedan dog damtidningen. Då började jag med Instagram, men Mickey hadde blivit gammal och istället för att satsa på att bygga mitt brand uppmuntrade han mig att göra linjär tv.

There was the forty-one-year-old Suleiman Kerimov, a quicksilver native of Dagestan, the volatile region neighbouring Chechnya. He’d first hit the headlines in 2006, when he’d wrapped his Ferrari around a tree on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais and nearly died from the burns, after which he retreated to the lowlit air-conditioned cool of his office on the top floor of a heavily guarded Moscow townhouse, his burned hands protected by thin fingerless gloves. Once he recovered he became notorious again for his lavish parties, where the likes of Beyoncé crooned to senior bankers from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs at his villa in Cap d’Antibes. By early 2007 Forbes was estimating his fortune at $14.4 billion, making him Russia’s second-richest man after Abramovich.