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The Bomber Mafia

A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

Malcolm Gladwell

First annotation on .

5 quotes


Section 9

  • McFarland wrote that Norden “read Dickens avidly for revelations on the lives of the disadvantaged and Thoreau for the discussion of the simple life.” He hated paying taxes. He thought Franklin Roosevelt was the devil.Sep 19 2023 11:48AM

Section 10

  • That’s the Army: deeply patriotic, rooted in service to country.Sep 19 2023 11:59AM
  • That’s very Navy: arrogant, independent, secure in the global scale of its ambitions.Sep 19 2023 11:59AM
  • And his conclusion was: this is a group of people who desperately want to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the older branches of military service, the Army and the Navy. And, further, the Air Force is utterly uninterested in heritage and tradition. On the contrary, it wants to be modern.Sep 19 2023 12:00PM

Section 11

  • The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies—that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.Sep 19 2023 12:04PM