Why Your Name Matters
Refusing to speak someone’s name either acknowledges their power or cancels it. Some traditions refuse to speak the name of their god in a show of humility; others signal scorn the same way.
Refusing to speak someone’s name either acknowledges their power or cancels it. Some traditions refuse to speak the name of their god in a show of humility; others signal scorn the same way.
A giant balloon, released in the Arctic, spewing chalk dust to dim the sun. It sounds the stuff of a late-night horror flick, but the project had the imprimatur of Bill Gates and researchers at Harvard University—not to mention $30 million in private funding.
A passion should be the thing you would do even if nobody paid you to do it, even if you had to go without air-conditioning or snacks, because some mysterious energy inside you rises to meet its challenge. One hates to see the word—or the feeling—diluted.
Berit Brogaard sees hate as “a complex emotion, built out of the negative emotions: resentment, condemnation, and reprehension.” We tend to fasten down on any one of those feelings, equating hatred with a vicious dislike, cold contempt, or utter disgust. That is too simple. Hate draws its power from the swirling mixture.
Instead of watching with vigilance for a stacked-stone wall or an S-curve or a white church steeple, I respond to robotic voice commands. It is a state of mind that turns me inward, disconnecting me from the land even as I move across it.
About seventy-five percent of all compliments are about appearance, with only five or six percent falling into categories of performance, ability, taste, or possessions. Why are we so shallow and unimaginative?
Shakespeare wanted us to struggle with an inscrutable villain. With evil itself. Our age equates evil with psychopathy, pointing to a physiological absence of the brain structures and biochemicals that give us empathy.
“Check in on your single friends,” freshly elected Vice President Kamala Harris urged last Thanksgiving. Five simple words, but behind them a sea change in how we organize our common lives.
Nothing is as simple, as pure, or as absolute as we want it to be. And there is intrigue and rich meaning in all these layers we cover over.
There is strength in bitchiness. Which takes me to the root of my aversion: Why, in women, was (and is) strength equated with meanness?