Michel Houellebecq's Submission in One Sentence

Even the word humanism made me want to vomit, but that might have been the canapés.

Houellebecq, Michel. Submission. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 204.

To Love a Book

Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, it pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave - a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you'd have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak so openly as when we face a blank page and address an unknown reader. The beauty of an author's style, the music of his sentences, have their importance in literature, of course; the depth of an author's reflections, the originality of his thought, certainly can't be overlooked; but an author is above all a human being, present in his books, and whether he writes well or very badly hardly matters - as long as he gets the books written and is, indeed, present in them. (It's strange that something so simple, so seemingly universal, should actually be so rare, and that this rarity, so easily observed, should receive so little attention from philosophers in any discipline: for in principle human beings possess, if not the same quality, at least the same quantity, of being; in principle they are all more or less equally present; and yet this is not the impression they give, at a distance of several centuries, and all too often, as we turn pages that seem to have been dictated by the spirit of the age than by an individual, we watch these wavering, ever more ghostly, anonymous beings dissolve before our eyes.) In the same way, to love a book is, above all, to love its author: we wish to meet him again, we wish to spend our days with him.

Houellebecq, Michel. Submission. Translated by Lorin Stein. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 4-5.

Bond, G-SIB Bond

[T]his is finance, so the regulator’s proposals inevitably come cloaked in impenetrable jargon dotted with obscure acronyms. The relevant measure of capital (equity plus the at-risk debt) is called “total loss-absorbing capacity” or TLAC. The ratio will only apply to the most important institutions, dubbed global systemically important banks (G-SIB). It is hard to see the public marching behind Mark Carney, who heads both the FSB and the Bank of England, shouting, “What do we want? Higher TLAC for G-SIBs. When do we want it? Phased in between 2019 and 2022, except for emerging-market banks which will have till 2025 to 2028 to comply.”

"Buttonwood: Born to Run," The Economist, Volume 417 Number 8964, November 14th-20th 2015, 72, Accessed on November 19, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21678259-bonds-will-take-hit-when-banks-fail-born-run

That's The Economist on the Financial Stability Board's new guidelines for bank balance sheets. Their idea is for private investors to bear the cost of bank failure by issuing special bonds with terms indicating that bondholders will be the first to take a hit should something go south with the bank. This way losses would be absorbed by bondholders rather than depositors. Therefore, it is thought, bank runs will be less likely. 

Bro, Where are the Shareholder Equity Accounts?

“In the cannabis industry, there is a lot of people that lose track of a lot of things,” said Nic Hernandez, head grower at La Conte’s Clone Bar & Dispensary, a legal marijuana outlet in Denver. An app from Flowhub helps him keep his operation straight.

Dwoskin, Elizabeth. "Silicon Valley's Unlikely New Frontier," The Wall Street Journal., Tuesday, November 17, 2015, Accessed on Wednesday November 18, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valleys-unlikely-new-frontier-1447810134?cb=logged0.7287707715295255

Wholly Foul

In life there is not time to grieve long.
But this, this is out of life, this is out of time,
An instant eternity of evil and wrong.
We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean, united to supernatural vermin,
It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is defiled,
But the world that is wholly foul.

Eliot, T.S. "Murder in the Cathedral" from The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1980, 214.