“The virus is real and it does not care how we see it or what we say about it.” What’s more, “the virus does not care whether our reason for assembling is a protest, a funeral, or a parade.”
Read More
“Operating outside of our conscious awareness, supernatural beliefs and ritual practices can motivate the faithful to make personally costly decisions, treat strangers more fairly, and contribute to public goods like charities (and avoid porn).”
Read More
This explains 95% of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s behavior on Twitter.
Read More
“My father is a true Renaissance Man, with a famously encyclopedic knowledge spanning the entire breadth of the liberal arts. He has an insatiable thirst for learning from books and media, but especially from the places he visits and the people he meets. He then generously and gleefully shares that knowledge with anyone and everyone nearby, whether they want it or not.”—Paul Bode
Read More
“Any Trump supporters who allowed themselves to recognize Trump’s swindle would immediately confront other, even more hurtful, doubts. If Trump was lying, did that imply that their trusted friends on radio and television had deceived them too: Sean and Rush and the Fox & Friends gang?”
Read More
After letting the men go, he told the women who remained: “You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.”
Read More
“Remind me to feel sorry for them while I’m celebrating Spring Festival 2021 in style because we took things seriously and suffered a while. Remind me to feel sorry for them when I walk home tonight through streets that are almost back to their pre-plague levels of social and economic activity (with added masks). Remind me to feel sorry for their self-inflicted injury. I won’t, but remind me anyway.”—Michael Richter
Read More
“I think that one of the unexpected impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic may be that a society that feels besieged by the threat of the virus will increasingly treat scientific information, and not just scientists, seriously.”—Nicholas A. Christakis
Read More
“The opposite of humanism is not theism but fanaticism; the opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. Fanaticism is therefore the chief enemy of humanism, and fanaticism in political life is the chief enemy of the liberal ideal.”—Adam Gopnik
Read More
If everything King Midas touches turns to gold, everything King Grant touches turns to shit. We need to scrap this funding structure altogether, replace it with some version of Universal Basic Income, and free our fellow citizens from the need to beg on the streets, on Patreon, or on grant applications. Then let the market decide whether or not they’ve created something of value.
Read More
When it comes to almost every other group, calling people what they want to be called is the go-to progressive move. Hispanics are the only exception I’m aware of. In this instance, progressives don’t call people what they want to be called. Instead, they call people what they think they ought to want to be called.
Read More
“Since our species has spent most of the last two million years living as hunter-gatherers, one might think that the one thing our big primate brains should be good at is surviving by hunting and gathering. If they didn’t evolve to make us better at hunting and gathering, then what did our big brains evolve for?”
Read More
Trump managed to get 73,125,600 votes despite countless unforced errors. The next guy—someone like, say, Tucker Carlson—won’t be nearly so clumsy and easy to beat. He’ll appeal to many of the same people—without all the skeletons in the closet, without all the baggage, without all the self-defeating stupidity—and, if present trends continue, he’ll win.
Read More
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. . . . Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
Read More
“If the Roaring Twenties following the 1918 pandemic are a guide, the increased religiosity and reflection of the immediate and intermediate pandemic periods could give way to increased expressions of risk-taking, intemperance, or joie de vivre in the post-pandemic period.”—Nicholas A. Christakis
Read More
“The lack of coordination at the federal level, prompted in part by the undue politicization of the pandemic, severely hampered the United States. . . . if the country were a student in one of my courses, I would not hesitate to hand it an F.”—Nicholas A. Christakis
Read More
“An enormous act of forgetting is required simply to kiss someone or to open your mouth for the fork of high-calorie paté someone is raising to your lips, which, considering the price, it would be a sin not to enjoy.”—Tony Hoagland
Read More
“Wherever I was going, I don’t care anymore, because no place I could arrive at is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience but to which experience will never measure up. And that dark and soaring fact is enough to make me renounce the whole world or fall in love with it forever.”—Tony Hoagland
Read More
Like the ruthless demagogue in The Dead Zone (1983) who uses a baby as a human shield, Trump’s enablers are trying to hide behind the 72,095,813 Americans who voted Republican on November 3, 2020.
Read More
“Who knew that the sweetest pleasure of my fifty-eighth year would turn out to be my friendship with the dog?”—Tony Hoagland
Read More