In recent years, many of Britain’s coastal communities have slipped behind the rest of the country in measures of income, education, and health, giving rise to an over-all feeling of depression and ill health which is recognized informally by doctors as S.L.S., or Shit Life Syndrome.
—From the New Yorker
“There are two kinds of European nations,” Kristian Jensen, the Danish Finance Minister, said last year, referring to Britain’s situation. “There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.”
In the East, I’ve heard it said, there’s intimacy without friendship; in the West, there’s friendship without intimacy.
—Karan Mahajan, in The New Yorker
Continue reading Friendship, intimacy, commerce, and the West
At the root of this is American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.
— Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker
Affleck’s was the kind of middle-aged-white-male sadness that the Internet loves to mock—a mocking that depends, simultaneously, on a complete rejection of this sadness, as well as a hedging identification with it. These depressed-Affleck images can arouse both amusement and a sense of poignancy, a touch of Schadenfreude as well as something like sympathy.
Barack Obama’s foreign policy was characterised as leading from behind.
Trump’s doctrine may come to be understood as retreating from the front.
In the original “Republic”—the one by Plato—a distinction is made between dialectic and eristic. The former is argument made in good faith, with the goal of apprehending the truth; the latter is argument as performance, with the goal of tearing down one’s opponent.
How a Liberal Scholar of Conspiracy Theories Became the Subject of a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory
It is hardly possible to overrate the value . . . of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves.” He then admitted, with some resignation, that this describes the Internet we should want, not the Internet we have.
How a Liberal Scholar of Conspiracy Theories Became the Subject of a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory
Use my marker 