If we all spoke circumspectly and wisely all the time, who would even need institutional free-speech policies? The point of speech rules is to allow space for the unguarded and the ill-tempered, for the provocative and prickly person as well as the smooth and sinuous. The smooth and sinuous will seldom say anything worth hearing in the first place.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Compared with protein, which lends itself to narratives of growth—more grams, more gains—fibre is a bit of a hard sell, likelier to be espoused by women in sensible shoes than by fitness junkies on Twitch. But the benefits of eating a high-fibre diet are arguably more significant. Gastroenterologists and influencers alike are eager to explain that fibre affects health beyond gut motility, formerly known as shitting: it slows digestion, which can make you feel full for longer and help manage blood sugar and body weight, and has been shown to lower cholesterol and blood pressure.
~ Hannah Goldfield via The New Yorker
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That is not to say America’s particular system of public health was ever perfect. Owing partly to the legacy of segregation, the country never developed a universal health-insurance program, and maintains a fragmented health-care system in which both class and race still dictate much of a patient’s access to care. Many people on the margins who have wanted to get screened for certain diseases or vaccinated against them have not been able to do so, because they cannot afford to or because no doctor will serve them.
~ Vann Newkirk via The Atlantic
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If anybody needs a day off it’s Cameron. He’s got a lotta things to sort out before he graduates. He can’t be wound up this tight and go to college. His roommate’ll kill him.
~ Ferris Bueller
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The show had its première party in New York City in early February. The Times’ Styles section did its glossy treatment of the night, which struck a familiar tone. The wish in a certain class of creative professionals today is to resuscitate the shift in the atmosphere of the nineties, that clash of the louche and the classed, the first gentrifications of downtown—impossible in the fully corporatized Manhattan of today.
~ Doreen St. Félix via The New Yorker
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Our fathers were our models for God, if our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?
~ Tyler Durden
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Charles Darwin found sex a mystery. He was perplexed not by the practice—he and his wife, who also happened to be his cousin, had ten children—but by the point of it.
~ Elizabeth Kolbert via The New Yorker
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Starting a new form of government at the close of an era, as the founders of the European Union tried to do, is not necessarily a doomed project. The United States might be called the last nation that was established before the onset of the Industrial Revolution. But you cannot really have an overarching federal government, such as the United States has, unless people are content to see the states lose power to the capital over the long term. Americans have made their peace with this, although it required a civil war and a good deal of other violence to bring consensus.
~ Christopher Caldwell via The New York Times
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Matthew Pitman is six feet tall, with hazel eyes and blond hair, which he keeps buzzed on the sides and floppy on top, or slicked into a stubby pony. He wears wraparound sunglasses with a bandanna or a backward baseball cap, or both. His land speed is a consistent half sprint. He speaks in complete, fluid sentences but, at times, jackhammer fast. No topic escapes his enthusiasm, or his powers of observation.
~ Paige Williams via The New Yorker
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So much of writing is battling your own mind to cough up the clearest idea or best word.
~ Lily Meyer via The Atlantic
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