When dinner from a restaurant replaces dinner in a restaurant, we lose track of all the other people who are dining as well. Part of the transformation of daily life wrought by Amazon and online retailing more generally, this hyper-individualization of consumption may bring a new political revolution as well.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
:::
The most notable change of these tumultuous years, the ability to spend more time working from home, hasn’t been a cure-all. Something’s still wrong, above and beyond the usual challenges of office life. Everyone’s tired. What started with the Great Resignation has become the Great Exhaustion.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
:::
To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.
~ Auguste Comte
:::
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
~ A. J. Liebling
:::
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
~ Niels Bohr
:::
:::
The Fascist system has to carry on persistently the task begun by the Fascist Movement: the destruction of the democratic parties, organisations, and institutions in society. Fascism must then proceed to attempt to change the nature of human consciousness itself.
~ Karl Polanyi
:::
:::
I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?
~ Wilfrid Sheed
:::
In our civilized society I must lead the life of a savage. I must free myself even from governments. My sympathies lies with the people; I must go to them directly. I must draw my wisdom from them, and they must give me life. For that reason I have just embarked on the grand, independent and vagabond life of the bohemian.
~ Gustave Courbet
:::
Economic theory as derived from Adam Smith assumes first that homo economicus acts with perfect optimality on complete information, and second that when many of the species homo economicus do that, their actions add up to the best possible outcome for everybody. Neither of these assumptions stands up long against the evidence.
~ Donella Meadows
:::
The exile will always be at least slightly alien to her adopted culture. At the same time, her knowledge of that new place and its people is immersive; she is not a tourist and she can never really return to the person she was before she left home. This duality is also the novelist’s superpower.
~ Gal Beckerman via The Atlantic
:::