” Saddam’s hands-on years in the dungeons distinguish him from the other great dictators of the 20th century, none of whom had much taste for “the wet stuff”. The mores of his regime have been shaped by this taste for the wet stuff - by a fascinated negative intimacy with the human body, and a connoisseurship of human pain. One is struck, too, by how routinely Saddam’s organs have used familial love as an additional instrument of torture. Here, in moral terms, we decisively enter the palace of the end, as the interrogator consigns your child to a sack full of starving cats. ”

Martin Amis, The palace of the end

What do you think is going on with France?
[Pause] They’re French.

Any elaboration
Nope. There’s always been some friction. I was once talking to a group of French intellectuals, and I said, ‘You think we’re arrogant, and we think you’re French.’ And they looked at each other and thought maybe I’d said something very intelligent. But that may well be it. It’s too bad, but life goes on, and we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do.

An interview with George Bush sr.

Tell me in simple terms, I plead, why the male Y chromosome is deteriorating.

‘Basically,’ he says, taking a deep breath, ‘the Y chromosome is a male signifier. It evolves quite rapidly, but downhill. We now have the human DNA sequence and the surprise is to find that most of it is not functional. It’s either decayed, or it’s simply redundant. That’s true for the entire human chromosome sequence. If you look at the Y, though, that truth is multiplied maybe 30 times. It’s only got 20 genes on it, most of which are employed keeping the cell it’s in alive.’

the future is female