“The pandemic has highlighted with vicious clarity the distinction between essential labor (ranging from doctors and nurses to grocery store workers to sanitation workers to food preparation workers to farm laborers to the transportation workers that get these essential workers to and from their jobs) and non-essential (or Zoom or bullshit) labor.”—François Furstenberg
Read More“Working-class America has not seemed dangerous for a long time. But back when it did seem dangerous, that danger persuaded the privileged—or enough of them—that concessions must be made.”
Read MoreIt takes a village to raise an asshole. Doesn’t happen overnight. One indulgent parent won’t do, nor will an indulgent spouse. Nope, it takes a village.
Read More“Monogamy provides a kind of societal-level testosterone-suppression program. In normatively monogamous societies, testosterone falls in men when they marry and again when they interact face-to-face with their children.”
Read More“Human attachments—even to pets—are so fundamental and beneficial that they can improve people’s health or, when lost, sometimes cause their deaths.”—Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint (2020)
Read More“A great lesson of the ancient DNA revolution is that its findings almost always provide accounts of human migrations that are very different from preexisting models, showing how little we really knew about human migrations and population formation prior to the invention of this new technology.”
Read MoreAlthough a single black swan can falsify the statement “All swans are white”, “Swans are usually white” remains true even if 5% of all swans are black. As Nicholas A. Christakis rightly observes in Blueprint (2019), “the existence of variation does not mean that there is not a central tendency in our species.”
Read More“Shackleton required that all men, regardless of profession or status . . . contribute to all forms of labor. . . . labor was allocated in a clear and fair manner, and food rations were split equally among the men (though, tellingly, Shackleton often gave his designated allotment to his crew).”—Nicholas A. Christakis
Read More“If you manage to convince yourself that you are right in theory, you don’t really care how your ideas affect others. Your ideas give you a virtuous status that makes you impervious to how they affect others.”—Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Read More“Is it because Voltaire wasn’t afraid to be nasty that he did so much good? Almost certainly.”—John Ralston Saul
Read More“It’s hard to imagine a society with less interest in what modern Westerners call marriage than the Na.”—Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint (2020)
Read More“When we walk out now, we feel our nakedness. Each step has a slender string attached. And when we move, we move more quietly.”—Tony Hoagland
Read MoreTo read Proust is to begin to see like Proust. It’s like tripping on magic mushrooms: everything slows down and you fall in love with life’s trivial details, which really aren’t all that trivial.
Read MoreMy beloved sons have each, in their own way, reminded me of what makes life worth living: the beautiful and the good.
Read MoreI never forget to make the bed now, first thing in the morning, Anna-Liisa never forgets to hang up her coat, and we dress for coronavirus success—because apparently civilization is just a beautiful island of order that emerges, from time to time, like Atlantis, out of a sea of chaos.
Read MoreSummer’s days are numbered, friend; Summer’s days are numbered.
Read More“It’s not good to have liberal parents growing up, it’s really not. Especially in your teenage years, because you can’t rebel. They love you no matter what. It’s really fucking annoying.”
Read More“In the interest of healthy relations between the sexes, I feel compelled to share the following story illustrating that men (although I use the term lightly in this instance) can be Karens too.”—Anonymous
Read MoreThere is an aspect of this crisis that I have not yet seen addressed very much, though perhaps I've been reading the wrong analysis. It is the ways in which this virus is likely to have a dramatically different effect on families based on social class.
Read MoreIf it’s true that these wet markets are behind the coronavirus pandemic, then they’re everybody’s problem. And I thank Melissa Chen for having the courage to say so.
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