Brodsky said that when confronted by boredom we should “exact full look at the worst.” He said “When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom.”
Quillette Podcast 10
Appiah is wrong to pretend that distinct civilizations were never a thing.
There’s nothing wrong with teaching Western Civilization or the Western classics alongside other cultural traditions. At the same time, the way Classics used to be taught is gone for good.
“Every human being worships something,” we’re told, whether it’s the movement of the planets, alien civilizations, a political cause, science, or even reason.
Salinger has been posthumously relegated to the limbo of #MeToo-tainted, “problematic” cultural figures, which probably accounts for the awkward half-silence around his centenary.
Progressives and corporations when aligned form a very powerful coalition, so when they combine to restrict speech or behavior they’re likely to be successful.
No one at Wilfrid Laurier University would give me a straight answer about anything. It was a climate of evasiveness and secrecy.
It would be decades before the people fully understood the fraudulence of 1959’s heady idealism, but it was corrupt from the start.
Residing in Malaysia in the final years of the Najib administration, one could be forgiven for thinking society had somehow collectively lost its mind.
Instead of using the label “eugenics” to discredit advocates of genetic enhancement, it would be more productive to ask what precisely we deem unacceptable and why.
When we tell ourselves we can be anything we want to be, which is the myth that emerges from Human Potential and self-esteem ideas, we’re setting ourselves up for unhappiness, because it’s simply not true.
Does more transparency mean that patients will become responsible for catching errors that doctors themselves should have prevented?