Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
~ Joseph Heller
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Author Archives: Gareth Antigua
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The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.
~ Friedrich Hayek
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People always clap for the wrong reasons.
~ J.D. Salinger
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Abounding in minorities, the left is increasingly attentive to hierarchies of respect and vigilant about monitoring them. Abounding in intellectuals, it is increasingly — and mistakenly — inclined to view democracy as a search for truth rather than as a search for consensus; it is prone to cast those who disagree with it, no matter how numerous, as democracy’s enemies and even as authoritarians.
~ Christopher Caldwell via The New York Times
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It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith
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In modern office life, our efforts rarely generate an immediate reward. When we answer an e-mail or attend a meeting, we’re typically advancing, in fits and starts, long-term projects that may be weeks or months away from completion. The modern knowledge worker also tends to juggle many different objectives at the same time, moving rapidly back and forth between them throughout the day.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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The Democrats banked on the idea that classic mommy-party traits—nurturing, fretting about life’s dangers—would appeal to voters worried about the chaos of Trumpism. Instead, their warnings came across as scolding, while Donald Trump’s wild antics were either embraced by his party as a selling point or dismissed as the harmless by-product of his showmanship.
~ Mike Pesca
via The HR-ification of the Democratic Party
published by The Atlantic on November 12, 2024
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Sometimes the best way to halt an escalation cycle is to demonstrate how unafraid you are of the escalation cycle.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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If brick-and-mortar restaurants become mere storefronts for delivery services, they will cease to be public spaces in any sense of the term.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, can’t easily separate the two. All of it—wages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flag—can be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain?
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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