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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That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith
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I’m the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they’re all dead.
~ Mickey Spillane
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The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.
~ Milan Kundera
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Like human resources, the Democrats are a party of norms, procedure, bureaucracy, DEI initiatives, rule following, language policing, and compliance. It is in this way that the Democratic Party feels not so much infuriating and threatening, but just kind of an annoying bummer.
~ Mike Pesca
via The HR-ification of the Democratic Party
published by The Atlantic on November 12, 2024
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