We must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It has always bothered me how even ordinary conversations tend to be defined by what we tell rather than by what we ask. Questions are taken for granted rather than given a starring role in the human drama.
~ Edgar H. Schein
:::
Democrats will tell you that they are the way they are because they’re trying to help Americans, because they know what’s best. But this was no more convincing to voters than a corporation’s insistence that the HR department exists to help employees. Absolutely no one believes that, of course. HR departments work for the people who hold the power, and they reinforce the company line, whatever that may be.
~ Mike Pesca
via The HR-ification of the Democratic Party
published by The Atlantic on November 12, 2024
:::
Although intergenerational population replacement involves long time lags, cultural change can reach a tipping point at which new norms become dominant. Conformism and social desirability effects then reverse polarity: instead of retarding the changes linked with intergenerational population replacement, they accelerate them, bringing unusually rapid cultural change.
~ Ronald Inglehart
:::
What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves.
~ David Foster Wallace
:::
Wishing all of our readers in the Dominican Republic a Happy Independence Day. Today – February 27 – is a public holiday in the Dominican Republic.
:::
Boundary-pushing ideas can be invigorating, and opportunities to question and resist received wisdom are essential to any free and democratic society. But the pursuit of transgression for its own sake can easily derail sound judgment. The risk is in presuming that anything subversive or sensational is also true and meaningful, and that anything conventional is a lie that must be smashed down. That is a brutal way to inhabit the world—and, I hope, a losing one.
~ Laura K. Field via The Atlantic
:::
I say that every prince must desire to be considered merciful and not cruel. He must, however, take care not to misuse this mercifulness.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
:::
No circumstance is ever so desperate that one cannot nurture some spark of hope.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
:::
Both Franz Kafka and the Bible are inexhaustible sources of meaning because they overflow any box we build around them. They exist on a plane of Western consciousness so formative of ours today that they seem to come from everywhere and nowhere.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
:::