3 ms·
Anastas Mikoyan is an interesting character. In another application of tricky diplomacy, he was one of the few Old Bolsheviks who managed to avoid being purged
by mjn 14y ago
Anastas Mikoyan is an interesting character. In another application of tricky diplomacy, he was one of the few Old Bolsheviks who managed to avoid being purged by Stalin, but also got ahead of the game on denouncing Stalin soon after his death, so avoided getting purged during de-Stalinization as well.
Less importantly, he's also the star of one of my favorite full-page magazine photos of all time, which I discovered while thumbing through an old issue of Life magazine: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/mikoyan_taco.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/mikoyan_taco.html
- thinker 14y agoHaha that is awesome yet also educational
- meric 14y agoIt says "Even for the ruling elite of the USSR, the taco is approached in a brief encounter, surfacing as trauma.", but I don't really understand. Why is it brief and why is it surfacing as trauma? It's trying to say something but I can't decipher it.
- mjn 14y agoThe final comment is an allusion to the article it links, which is only tangentially related (in that it's also about tacos): http://www.kmjn.org/notes/specters_of_tacology.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/specters_of_tacology.html My goal in that article was to connect some comments I'd been hearing from philosophers, about taking things seriously in themselves (as opposed to only reducing things to their cultural roles) with an offhand comment a professor I know (Ian Bogost) had made about his hypothetical future career studying "tacology", the science of tacos and burritos, which he argued were woefully understudied. So, I wrote a half-satirical "literature review" of the current academic study of tacos and burritos, surveying tacological references I could find in the literature. It really is a literature review, but many of the references I turned up are strangely ominous, discussing "mass psychogenic illness", violence in the parking lot of Taco Bell, and other such things. Thus, I weave them into a Lovecraftian hypothesis, which proposes that there is a hidden evil at the heart of tacology, which leads academics to study tacos and burritos only superficially, shrinking back at the instant they realize they have delved too deeply.
- meric 14y agoThanks for the explanation! I missed the link the first time.