“Anyone who truly believes in the magic of the marketplace will always insist that any problem, any injustice, any absurdity that might seem to be produced by the market is really caused by government interference with same.”
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“It was the worst day in the history of our planet. A few hours of unimaginable violence.”
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“Salamanders bigger than humans seem like a mad hallucination. As bizarre as they were, though, Metoposaurus and its kin were not aliens.”
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Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. For instance, to an extent that most accounts still underrate, the Bolshevik Revolution and the modern jihadist movement were German-financed operations.
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Most of the remedies Mark Zuckerberg envisages for inequality (e.g., universal basic income, affordable childcare, etc.) cannot be achieved globally but are only viable as national policies delivered by the old twentieth-century welfare state.
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A review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin In the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018).
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“The factory worker in Pennsylvania and the farmer in Pakistan may both be struggling and angry, but they are also, by the standards of the past, wealthy people.”
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How do you know if the French chef is really French if you don’t speak French?
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“Every billionaire is a distinct experiment in what happens when everything is permitted.”—Stephen Marche
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“A live educator offers more than the content of a course. Human interaction and presence are important components of effective pedagogy.”
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“While the United States has benefited from diversity, it cannot build its national identity around diversity as such.”
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If Machiavelli’s ghost could speak and we were willing to listen, I suspect he’d ask us: “How free are you now if you’re not even free to use Facebook?”
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“Fatherlessness as a condition has been linked with virtually every social ill you can name.”
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More often than not, if it looks like a duck, it’s a duck. And if it looks like a schmuck, talks like a schmuck, and walks like a schmuck, it’s a schmuck.
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“By August 2017, what was left of the philosophy formerly known as conservatism beyond ‘fuck you, leftists’?”—David Frum
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Leonard Cohen’s delightful homage to Kanye West and hip-hop never ceases to charm me.
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Aaron Haspel is the greatest master of the aphoristic form writing in English today.
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“I don’t want to be in power myself, but I want those who are in power to tell me the truth. I’d force those lowlifes to come here and walk around the entire cemetery. . . . I want them to see what their lies led to. Lies!”
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One woman cussed me out and said she knew her child was a virgin, until I said no, her child was pregnant.
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Were we pushing the limits of human nature or trying to figure out where they might be?
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