Gum was once used by the old to condemn bad manners and the young to rebel against a mannered society. Now manners are a lost cause—and gum is doing real harm. It is just one more example of how we try too hard, whether to have fun or to make a buck, and then the things that once charmed us with their whimsy end up destroying another chunk of our world.
In novels, romance is all valleys and peaks: a woman who is miserable, afraid, and fleeing for her life (or at least her virtue) is rescued with a single strong, sweeping gesture and set atop a pedestal. You have to be really miserable first, for it to work. Nobody tells you that. Girls used to walk around waiting to be impressed, but the stakes were always too low—and who wants to be miserable just to be happy?
We need labels—for consistent insurance reimbursement, if nothing else—and we need ways to stop thinking in terms of labels. But we get so trapped by territoriality and logistics that we never manage to integrate approaches; we insist on wiping one out in favor of the other—a tendency that does deserve a pathologizing diagnosis.
We have, in short, the perfect conditions for dystopian literature to thrive. But dystopia, Lepore points out, is increasingly unhealthy. Once a form of resistance, it has become “a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely and sullen twenty-first century…. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one.”
Intellectual humility could make us more tolerant of beliefs we do not share, ideas we do not embrace. (Even as I type that sentence, inside a little voice is screaming that some of those ideas could kill people. A life-or-death situation is no place to try for self-improvement.)
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson shocked a lot of his fans when he gave the simulation hypothesis fifty-fifty odds of being true, adding that it was hard to argue that we were not in a simulation.
To decide whether interrupting is rude, you cannot generalize. You need to know the style (verbal and cognitive) of everyone in the conversation, as well as its tone and its level of difficulty.
To be pillowed, the Urban Dictionary tells us, is to be so exhausted you feel giddy, a little drunk.
There is much I never knew in Index, "A History of the, whose subhead promises “A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age.” First, I never realized how jokey indexes could be, or how easily they could pop an overblown ego.
Some of the Ukrainians fled to other parts of their own country. Keep going, I urged them mentally. You are not safe yet. But where is safe?
In her book "The Helpers," Kathy Gilsinan has asked questions most reporters do not think to bother with, gathering up tiny details and using the most telling to bring these people to life. You feel you know them, not just casually but the way you know longtime coworkers or neighbors.
Graffiti is about breaking rules. It ignores convention, shuns commerce. Once Ruggeri had lived long enough, gathered enough perspective from travel and textbooks, and running a bar where souls spilled, he figured out how to channel that energy, and he rediscovered freedom. With raw exhilaration, graffiti unlocked his art.