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Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos Biography

Journalist

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“After residents had secured the major markers of wealth - the home, the right schools, the serenity of private aviation - they turned their attention to the real game in town: the refining of advantage, the expansion of the margins, the hedging against trouble, real and imagined. If you knew where to look you could hone every edge of your life - from your life expectancy to your tax avoidance to your child's performance on the SATs. You could, in other words, make sure that the winners keep winning.”

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Book:Wildland: The Making of America's Fury
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“In the intervening decades, American unity had given way to bitter rivalries - and a contempt for leaders and their institutions, who had marched the country into Iraq and the Great Recession. Older workers had been gutted by debt, and younger people would never make up for the years of lost earnings. As Americans hunted for the origins of their pain they carved themselves up into rival tribes - Republicans and Democrats; city-dwellers and country people; white, Black, Latino, and Asian; Christian, Muslim, and Jewish; and centrally, those will college degrees and those without - the winners and losers of the meritocratic hustle.”

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Book:Wildland: The Making of America's Fury
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“One of the arguments that authoritarian governments use to ward off the call for greater political freedom is to argue that American-style democracy is no guarantee of good policy.... Over the years, I’ve grown used to these arguments, and my response has rarely wavered: Sure, we might make dumb choices sometimes, but we will defend, to the end, the right to make choices at all, because we believe that our collective conscience, freely expressed, will eventually lead us in the right direction. When it comes to guns, it is getting harder to muster that argument abroad. Every new shooting, every new failure of will and citizenship, slashes another hole in our credibility as a way of life.”

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Author:Evan Osnos
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“Mao’s touch acquired otherworldly significance: when a Pakistani delegation gave Mao a basket of mangoes in 1968, he regifted them to workers, who wept and placed them on altars; crowds lined up and bowed before the fruit. A mango was flown to Shanghai on a chartered plane, so that workers such as Wang Xiaoping could see it. “What is a ‘mango’? Nobody knew,” she recalled in an essay. “Knowledgeable people said it was a fruit of extreme rarity, like Mushrooms of Immortality.” When the mangoes spoiled, they were preserved in formaldehyde, and plastic replicas were created. A village dentist who observed that one of the mangoes resembled a sweet potato was tried for malicious slander and executed.”

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Book:Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
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“When it became clear that Xi Jinping was placing his bet on fortifying the status quo, another Party aristocrat, Hu Dehua, the sixty-three-year-old son of a previous Party chief, Hu Yaobang, used the protection afforded by his family name and pedigree to openly criticize the president. The real reason the Soviets fell, Hu Dehua argued, was that they couldnt stop themselves from appropriating public property by graft and bribery. The Party, Hu said, was indeed facing a crisis. There are two options: to suppress the opposition or to reach reconciliation with the people, he said. It had faced this choice once before, in 1989; and in an astonishing acknowledgment of the bloodshed at Tiananmen, he asked, What does this mean: man enough? Is driving battle tanks against your own people man enough?”

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Author:Evan Osnos
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“Donald Trump has the ability to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal as he says, but if he were to do so, this would be regarded in Tehran as an abrogation of the deal. This would allow the Iranian side of the deal to in effect withdraw because they could say that the United States has not held up its end of the bargain, and therefore we're going to restart our nuclear program.”

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Author:Evan Osnos
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“If you go back and you look at the presidency over the course of history, presidents tend to do what they campaigned on. In the 20th century, presidents between Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter accomplished 73 percent of the things that they said they would do as candidates. Part of that is because once they get into office, their credibility, their ability to do anything depends on doing the things that they said they would.”

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Author:Evan Osnos
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