Quoted: The regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il appears to be rolling back reforms and putting succession plans on hold. Speculation has been swirling about whether the ailing Kim has anointed his youngest son as successor. But, as NPR's Louisa Lim reports — after a rare five-day visit to North Korea — Kim Jong Il now is back on center stage.

Quoted: In such ideas, one finds a bridge between his inescapable moral imperative to break with a destructive fantasy-world through a decisive Act, and his recognition that the conditions for action, for the shaping of the site événementiel must be created through a long history of much less dramatic but no less decisive Acts. In a sense, this is a shift from revolutionary gesture to revolutionary gestation.

Quoted: A photographer who has made the most of inside access to document revolutionary change discusses what it is like to see history unfold, from the outside.

Arundhati Roy's response to the Economist review ...

Quoted: Thomas Corwin of Ohio — who served as a governor, a U.S. representative, a U.S. senator and secretary of the Treasury under Millard Fillmore in the 1850s — believed that having a sense of humor caused him political grief. "Never make people laugh," he told a young politician. To succeed, you must be "solemn as an ass." All the great monuments on Earth, he said, have been built to honor solemn asses.

Quoted: Moses, who was instrumental in shaping modern New York City, is depicted in Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning book as a power-hungry bureaucrat who, while never elected, had more control over public works than most mayors and governors ...

Quoted: Was the passage from Lenin to Stalin necessary?

I just realized that the link might not work correctly. I apologize for that, here is a better link: http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2779

Interesting early ideas on the role of cooperation in evolution.

Quoted: Spheres are the spaces where people actually live. I would like to show that human beings have, till today, been misunderstood, because the space where they exist has always been taken for granted, without ever being made conscious and explicit.