"...rippled through the august chamber."Exxon Mobil, the giant oil corporation appearing before the Supreme Court yesterday, had earned a profit of nearly $40 billion in 2006, the largest ever reported by a U.S. company -- but that's not what bothered Roberts. What bothered the chief justice was that Exxon was being ordered to pay $2.5 billion -- roughly three weeks' worth of profits -- for destroying a long swath of the Alaska coastline in the largest oil spill in American history.
"So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive-damages awards such as this?" Roberts asked in court.
The lawyer arguing for the Alaska fishermen affected by the spill, Jeffrey Fisher, had an idea. "Well," he said, "it can hire fit and competent people."
The rare sound of laughter rippled through the august chamber. The chief justice did not look amused.
-Dana Milbank, Washington Post
If you can convert whatever it is you're trying to remember into vivid mental images and then arrange them in some sort of imagined architectural space, known as a memory palace, memories can be made virtually indelible.-from Joshua Foer's article on Memory in the November 2007 National Geographic.
...Well, I know that the apocalyptic imagination is usually a lack of imagination; it refuses to face the dull prose of suffering, refuses to understand just how bad things can get without history coming to an end. Empires can limp on for centuries.-metameat
...My framed Ulysses poster fell off the wall and shattered, but I’m the kind of guy who keeps a spare framed Ulysses poster in the basement.
