Category: ideas

“Cults, generally speaking, are a lot like pornography: you know them when you see them. … Less easy, though, is identifying why. Knee-jerk reactions make for poor sociology, and … often (just as with pornography), what we choose to see as a cult tells us as much about ourselves as about what we’re looking at.” Tara Isabella Burton looks at numerous examples and considers where it’s appropriate to draw the line.

“The defining trait of the age seems to be arrogance — in particular, the kind of arrogance personified by our tweeter in chief; the arrogance of thinking that you know it all and that you don’t need to improve because you are just so great already. But our culture’s infatuation with this kind of arrogance doesn’t come out of the blue.”

“Democracy cannot function when every citizen is an expert. Yes, it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a democracy while ignoring its voters; it is also, however, ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those more educated and experienced than themselves.”

For instance: “Phyllis Latour Doyle, secret agent for Britain during World War II, spent the war years sneaking information to the British using knitting as a cover. She parachuted into occupied Normandy in 1944 and rode stashed bicycles to troops, chatting with German soldiers under the pretense of being helpful—then, she would return to her knitting kit, in which she hid a silk yarn ready to be filled with secret knotted messages, which she would translate using Morse Code equipment.”

A charity in Britain is pushing people to buy and restore buildings like the Tonedale Mills in Somerset. “The original timber structure was built in 1754, and rebuilt in brick after a fire in 1821. At its peak, making wool serge, and later khaki dye for army uniforms, it was the largest mill in the south-west, employing more than 3,600 people. Plans for redevelopment were stymied when the housing market collapsed in the 2008 financial crash.”

Margaret Atwood: “The Handmaids have escaped from their box. They’ve gotten out of their package. They’re strolling all over the place. … They were in the Texas Legislature surrounded by men with guns. It could have been a still right out of [the show].”

America is producing fewer startups now than previous eras. Fewer jobs are being created by new businesses. And what new companies do exist are hopelessly concentrated among certain industries and geographies. Metros like Los Angeles and New York dominate the scene; most other cities are largely stagnant.

Quixotism – “adopting the moral courage necessary to fight for lost causes without caring what the world thinks” – can “save people from the paralysis that often accompanies defeatism.” Mariana Alessandri argues that “today, when much of society and politics – both in and outside the United States – looks like a lost cause to a great number of people, we might do well to consider Quixote’s brand of lunacy.”

“Pessimistic essayists and philosophers may not cast the same narrative gloom as fiction writers, but the implications of their work tend toward the universal. Indeed, to believe that unhappiness was merely a question of immediate circumstance and particular character might be seen as a crass form of optimism.”

“Another story is emerging from several recent papers and columns by economists and economic writers. Instead of a world without work, they say, there is currently more evidence for a world with too much work—and not enough humans to do it all. Rather than high-flying investment in machines and similarly high unemployment, there is strangely low investment and happily low joblessness. How can anybody say robots are killing jobs when the killer is nowhere to be seen and the supposed victim isn’t even dead?”