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The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!
–Willa Sibert Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop bk vii, ch 4 (1927)
More from Scott Horton:
No Comment — April 12, 2013, 11:11 am
A new report from Seton Hall University exposes government surveillance of attorney-client conversations
No Comment, Six Questions — March 18, 2013, 9:00 am
Rashid Khalidi on how the United States sustains the failure of the Israel-Palestine peace process
No Comment, Six Questions — February 4, 2013, 9:00 am
Alex Gibney on his documentary investigating the Roman Catholic Church’s handling of child sex-abuse cases


Minimum number of baboons forced to smoke crack in a 1989 study testing the efficacy of cigarettes as a drug delivery device:

A reduction in distrust toward atheists was documented among pious Canadians who are reminded of the Vancouver police.

A Missouri cinema apologized for hiring an actor dressed in body armor and carrying a fake rifle to appear at a screening of Iron Man 3.
“This is the heart of the magic factory, the place where medicine is infused with the miracles of science, and I’ve come to see how it’s done.”