Tanner Gesek

Excerpts, quotes, things I’ve read and liked and felt like sharing somewhere less transitory than Twitter (X, whatever). Caveat emptor.

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“I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor
in spite of the best advice.”
– Wendell Berry (link)

“Pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me … 0 damnable Uptown! By all means, deny it if asked!-what one knows, in one’s cheating heart, and what one says are two different things! So it was that the art mating ritual developed early in the century-in Paris, in Rome, in London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and, not too long afterward, in New York. As we’ve just seen, the ritual has two phases:

1. The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.

2. The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards-and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity.” – Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

“Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!” Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete. So we have all this amazing technological and cognitive energy, the brilliance of the human species, wasted on reciting the lines written by poorly evolved cellular receptors and blind economics, like gods being ordered around by a moron. Some people have mystical experiences and see God. There in Las Vegas, I saw Moloch.” – Scott Alexander (link)

“I caution the audience to show off less. It’s very important to have substance first. Why should we go with the thoughts of an intellectual that straightforwardly hates us? That’s why the bitterness of isolation of thought is poison. I think to truly have your ideas flourish, you must love society. You must love the people in it and genuinely try to be kind of benevolent, to be positively oriented. And I think rebellion is a useful thing to start with but it ultimately limits growth. A rebel always assumes that they will be destroyed. I would claim that subconsciously, very quietly, they assume that eventually they’re going to get me and I’m going to be this tragic figure like Galileo or Jan Hus or whatever… I’m going to be burned at the stake, and I’m like, okay, so it feels like you’ve already written your play, why don’t you write a better ending to it?” – Samo Burja (link)

“I have some further notions about my opposites — the men and women in whom I can detect no relation to the soul of their childhood. When I was a newspaperman I greeted them as they got off trains and tagged along with them to hotel suites. It was my chore to interview them, for they were the people who ran the world. They were armed with certitudes and as alike mentally as the teeth of a comb. **They were the mindless, moodless hunters of success.** I could not then understand how men and women who differed in no way from the dullest of failures I knew in my daily life could be such thumping successes. Later I understood. They were successful for the same reason that their kind were usually failures. Their success was founded on the fact that they were not themselves. They had borrowed identity from the world and not out of their own souls. This feat produced equally the leader and the led. I have found most “greatness” in people to be of this quality. Lacking individuality, they can only become big with the world. They feel their importance as their identity. Of true greatness there is a fine definition in the Old Testament. It is told in Exodus that Moses spent forty days with God and that when he returned to the common ways of man his face was radiant — but he did not know it. To such radiance I have always bowed.” – Ben Hecht

“People new to a field will often copy existing work. There’s nothing inherently bad about that. There’s no better way to learn how something works than by trying to reproduce it. Nor does copying necessarily make your work unoriginal. Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones.” – Paul Graham (link)

“This approach has worked for Partners in Health. And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn’t care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He’s still going to make these hikes, he’d insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you’re saying that their lives matter less than some others’, and the idea that some lives matter less in the root of all that’s wrong with the world. I think he undertakes what, earlier today, he called ‘journeys to the sick’ in part because he has to, in order to keep going. ‘That’s when I feel most alive,’ he told me once on an airplane, ‘when I’m helping people.’ He makes these house calls regularly and usually without white people as witnesses, at times when no one from Harvard or the World Health Organization can see him kneeling on mud floors with his stethoscope plugged in. This matters to him, I think – to feel, at least occasionally, that he doctors in obscurity, so that he knows he doctors first of all because he believes it’s the right thing to do.. How does one person with great talents come to exert a force on the world? I think in Farmer’s case the answer lies somewhere in the apparent craziness, the sheer impracticality, of half of everything he does, including the hike to Casse.” – Tracy Kidder

“He leaves family and friends with their known rules and enters the realm of ambivalent fortune where things both horrible and wonderful might happen to him. He was wise, then, to pay homage to uncertainty before leaving town, which is to say he was wise to make the sacrifice Eshu asked for. Paying attention to Eshu has an effect on luck. I think of luck as the disposition of chance, and of Eshu as the force that can turn that disposition sunny or sour. Tricksters are masters of reversal, remember, and Eshu is a special case, his stock in trade being the reversal of fortune. He can rob a woman of her children, or make the barren wife fertile. He can turn friendship into hatred, make the moon and sun change places, turn right into wrong, make the innocent seem guilty and the ugly beautiful. In Ajaolele’s world, it is certainly not the case that a man could get himself a bride without giving bridewealth. Men are destined to give bridewealth; that is the way things are. Unless, of course, a man could somehow step outside “the way” and in the less than orderly world of a foreign bazaar suffer some lucky happenstance; then perhaps he could become “someone with a following” despite the rigid rule of fate. Perhaps, if its disposition were right, a chance event could change his lot in life.” – Lewis Hyde

“Luftmensch, noun, luft·mensch: an impractical contemplative person having no definite business or income.” – Merriam-Webster Dictionary (link)

“We found that people use the label stupid for three separate types of situation: (1) violations of maintaining a balance between confidence and abilities; (2) failures of attention; and (3) lack of control. The level of observed stupidity was always amplified by higher responsibility being attributed to the actor and by the severity of the consequences of the action. These results bring us closer to understanding people’s conception of unintelligent behavior while emphasizing the broader psychological perspectives of studying the attribute of stupid in everyday life.” – Balazs Aczel, Bence Palfi, Zoltan Kekecs (link)

“It’s probably not unreasonable, at least at Blog-Post-level-precision, to think of social returns as following Metcalfe’s Law: the social returns to angel investing as a collective will be proportional to the square of the number of people who locally care about angel investing. If you invest in the next Stripe, the social returns to that investment will be proportional to the number of people who could theoretically congratulate you about it. There’s a strong network effect at work.” – Alex Danco (link)

“The true sinew of war is endless streams of money.” – Cicero (link)

“The reason Occupy and the Tea Party were such uncanny replicas of one another is because they both drew on the lazy, reflexive libertarianism that suffuses our idea of protest these days, all the way from Disney Channel teens longing to be themselves to punk rock teens vandalizing a Starbucks. From Chris Hedges to Paul Ryan, every dissenter imagines that they are rising up against “the state.” It’s in the cultural DNA of our times, it seems; our rock ‘n’ roll rebels, our Hollywood heroes, even our FBI agents. They all hate the state—protesters in Zuccotti Park as well as the Zegna-wearing traders those protesters think they’re frightening. But here’s the rub: only the Right manages to profit from it. As things developed, the Tea Party didn’t really mean any of its horizontalist talk; that was just there to make the movement attractive to potential joiners. The Tea Party had no poststructuralist thinkers contributing to theory magazines, but it did have money, organization, and a TV network at its back. It quickly developed leaders, and demands, and an alignment with a political party. Its main organizations eventually mutated into Super PACs, their antihierarchical populism apotheosized into money—which is, for free-market believers, the purest expression of the General Will available. And perhaps that was the plan of the movement’s masters all along. The vagueness and the leaderlessness were merely for show, it seems—gimmicks designed to give the product the widest possible appeal in the early days. Occupy Wall Street never made that turn. It took its horizontality seriously. It grew explosively in the early days, as just about everyone with a beef rallied to its nonspecific standard. But after the crackdown came, there was almost nothing to show for it.” – Thomas Frank (link)

“Art is a means for bringing imaginative intensity to life.  It functions like the nighttime dreamwork that reworks the experiences of the day, revising them in the service of our desires or simply making sense of them by strengthening meaningful associations and eliminating meaningless ones.  Visual art also enriches our lives by restoring the element of intense sensation that is drained from experience by reason and narrative.  The meaningfulness and intensity of art compensate for the triviality and dullness of everyday life. Before you can say why most art seems boring, you need to say what “boring” means.  There are three basic kinds of boredom.  Boredom is often associated with experiences that make us anxious.  It’s boring to wait for 45 minutes in a doctor’s office, while sitting on a moving train for the same length of time can seem like an interval of freedom–an opportunity to read or daydream.  Boredom is also associated with unfamiliarity.  As another answer points out, it can be boring listening to people speak a foreign language.  You feel like you ought to understand what they’re saying, but you don’t.  (This leads back to anxiety-as-boredom.)  Paradoxically, boredom can also result from excessive familiarity: when you hear or see the same thing over and over, you get frustrated by the lack of novelty.  Art can fall prey to all three kinds of boredom.” – Pepe Karmel, Professor, Dep’t of Art History, NYU

“Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.” – Cambridge University researchers (link)

“The other thing you need to understand about fools is that it’s very hard work, being one. Not just because we have to dance around for kings and fall off buildings. It takes stubborn will to remain ignorant—not to mention all that seeing into men’s souls business. As my mother once announced to with dignity to the family—I believe we were mocking her—“It’s not easy being a fool.”” – Sadie Stein (link)

“If you feel that life always deals you a bad hand, take heart. Scientists in Australia have proved that two games guaranteed to give a player a steady string of losses can generate a sure-fire winning streak if played alternately.” – Nature (link)

“My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country. They have no clue how far they are from making themselves understood. Their ideas aren’t bad; they are raw versions of ideas that underlie established research programmes.”  – Sabine Hossenfelder (link)

“At an early point in his career, probably no later than 1930, Walt Disney lost the ability to draw what he wanted his cartoon characters to look like or his animations to do. So he began to act his cartoons out. In story meetings with his growing staff of animators – some of whom he had trained in Los Angeles at his studio on Hyperion Avenue, others whom he’d poached from the great New York studios – Disney would get up, according to Neal Gabler’s new biography, “enter his trance, and suddenly transform himself uninhibitedly into Mickey or Donald or an owl or an old hunting dog . . . ‘He would imitate the expressions of the dog, and look from one side to the other, and raise first one brow and then the other’ . . . ‘You’d have the feeling of the whole thing,’ Dick Huemer noted. ‘You’d know exactly what he wanted.’” – Mark Greif (link)

“Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.” – Jerry Pournelle (link)

“What both teams discovered was nothing less than a vast underground network, called a mycorrhiza, in which fungi connect trees of different species by passing chemical and electrical signals among the trees’ roots. It was an arboreal Internet—christened the “wood wide web.” Trees could actually communicate by exchanging carbon through their roots. The exchange offered mutual support. Carbon is the food of trees, created by photosynthesis, using the leaves as solar panels. Sometimes one tree would act as mother to its neighbors, giving them more carbon than it received in return. Later the debt would be repaid as the roles were reversed. As the subtleties of this underground network were explored, it became clear to scientists that trees not only benefited by mutual exchange of food. They exchanged vital information, warning their neighbors (and children) of threats and advising them of opportunities to seize. For example, if a tree’s leaves are bitten by a caterpillar, it will send a message though the mycorrhiza, prompting other trees in the network to release chemicals that repel caterpillars.” – Thomas Pakenham (link)

“For the Brain, Cash Is Good, Status Is Better: New studies show that money and social values are processed in the same brain region, providing insight into how we make choices.” – Nikhil Swaminathan (link)

“”Don’t have sex with each other,” they warned. “Above all, don’t romanticise the communal life – dress for work every day, keep regular business hours, and learn proper phone manners.”” – Jason Farago (link)

“More often than not, the strength of conviction behind a strategy’s more tenuous elements wins more… than its tenuous connection to reality warrants.” – Adam Elkus (link)

“It has long been frustrating to me that the only criterion by which Americans — almost without exception — evaluate judges is: *Did he or she make decisions that produce results I’d like to see?* Virtually no one asks whether the judge has rightly interpreted existing law, which is of course what the judge is formally required to do. Americans — again, almost without exception — want judges to be politicians and advocates. The idea that a judge should strive to interpret existing law regardless of whether it does or doesn’t promote politically desirable ends never crosses anyone’s mind, and if by some strange chance it did, the person whose mind was so crossed would reject the proposal indignantly. Americans in this respect resemble toddlers and their own President: they evaluate everything in terms of whether it helps or hinders them in getting what they want. This devaluation of interpretation amounts to a dismissal of the task of understanding: everything that matters is already understood, so the person who would strive to understand is not only useless, but an impediment to the realization of my political vision. To the partisan, the absence of partisanship is always a sin, and perhaps the gravest of sins.” – Alan Jacobs (link)

“Time will help him, but intellectual maturity with regard to clearness is apt to come rather late. This seems an unfortunate arrangement of Nature, inasmuch as clearness is of less use to a man settled in life, whose errors have in great measure had their effect, than it would be to one whose path lay before him. It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself known such a man; and who can tell how many histories of circle-squarers, metaphysicians, astrologers, and what not, may not be told in the old German story?” – Charles S. Peirce (link)

“A mythology, if it is to be effective, must be all-encompassing. The death of gods is a chain reaction; each drags another down into the abyss. Abyssus abyssum invocat. Hence the necessity – of which experienced priests are well aware – of maintaining the mythology as a system in which every detail is equally important and equally holy. The logic of mythology is familiar to every priest; it is there in his mind when he says: today you will miss Mass, tomorrow you will curse God, and the day after that you will become a Bolshevik. This is why only Stalinism, because it was all-encompassing, was a viable mythology. Stalin’s priests said: today you will admire a painting by Paul Klee, tomorrow you will cease admiring socialist-realist architecture, the day after that you will start to doubt the leap from quantity to quality, and the day after that you will renounce your loyalty to Caesar. And since Caesar’s rule is the rule of the people, you will be an enemy of the people. So by admiring a painting by Paul Klee you become an enemy of the people in potentia; you are ‘objectively’ an enemy of the people, a spy and a saboteur. The power of this strategy, confirmed by centuries of historical experience, is undeniable. And its collapse had to be as total as its rule had been: a chain of divinities, collapsing like a pack of cards. What folly to imagine it was possible to extract just one!” – Leszek Kolakowski, “The Death of Gods”

“Last Thursday, my organization, People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction, orchestrated an overwhelming show of force around the globe. At precisely 9 in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At 10, Phase II began, during which our entire membership did not force a single man to suck another man’s penis. Also, none of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place. No civilians were literally turned inside out via our powerful explosives. In addition, at 11, in Phase III, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings. During Phase IV, just after lunch, we were able to avoid bulldozing a single home. Furthermore, we set, on roads in every city, in every nation in the world, a total of zero (0) roadside bombs which, not being there, did not subsequently explode, killing/maiming a total of nobody. No bombs were dropped, during the lazy afternoon hours, on crowded civilian neighborhoods, from which, it was observed, no post-bomb momentary silences were then heard. These silences were, in all cases, followed by no unimaginable, grief-stricken bellows of rage, and/or frantic imprecations to a deity. No sleeping baby was awakened from an afternoon nap by the sudden collapse and/or bursting into flame of his/her domicile during Phase IV.” – George Saunders (link)

“So much for seventeen pages of business advice. The other three hundred forty-eight pages are Trump gushing about the minutiae all of the interesting deals he’s been a part of. “GUYS, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS, THERE WAS THIS ONE SKYSCRAPER THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE A FLOOR TO AREA RATIO OF 6, BUT THEN I BEAT HILTON IN NEGOTIATING THE AIR RIGHTS FROM THE COMPANY NEXT DOOR, AND ACTIVATED AN OPTION TO BUY A PROPERTY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF IT, AND ALL OF THAT LANDED ME A PARTNERSHIP WITH ONE OF THE BIG BANKS, AND THEN THE PLANNING BOARD TOTALLY CHANGED THE FLOOR AREA RATIO! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT, GUYS??!” Overall the effect was that of an infodump from an autistic child with a special interest in real estate development, which was both oddly endearing and not-so-oddly very boring.” – Scott Alexander (link)

“Loving winning and hating losing are two fairly distinct motivations.  For instance, a fairly joyless person may nonetheless be motivated by the humiliation of a loss, or a non-envious, non-spiteful type could receive great pleasure from being number one, while not minding if someone later climbs higher yet.” – Tyler Cowen (link)

“The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more. The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence. The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion. The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.” – Grice’s Maxims (link)

“The advertisements of the time touted it as “The Greatest Discovery Of The Age”, patented by Joseph Glidden, of De Kalb Illinois. Gates described it more poetically: “lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust.” – ‘The devil’s rope’: How barbed wire changed America – BBC News (link)

“The practical thing for a traveller who is uncertain of his path is not to proceed with the utmost rapidity in the wrong direction: it is to consider how to find the right one.” – R. H. Tawney (link) 

“The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.” – C.S. Lewis (link)

“Emotional granularity is a key to emotional intelligence. If your brain can construct many different emotions automatically and make fine distinctions among them, it can tailor your emotions better to your situation. You’re also better equipped to anticipate and perceive emotion in others in the blink of an eye. The more emotions that you know, the more finely your brain can construct emotional meaning automatically from other people’s actions. Even though your brain is always guessing, when it has more options to guess with, the odds are better it will guess appropriately.” – Lisa Feldman Barrett (link)

“When I was twenty-five, having studied economics for six years, I grasped suddenly that prices are for allocation, not fairness. When I was twenty-eight, an assistant professor with Steve Cheung as an office mate, I grasped that prices are only one possible system for allocation (violence and queuing are others), but socially the cheapest. When I was in my thirties I could spot this stuff for myself in actual markets.” – Donald McCloskey (link)

“Has it occurred to you that nobody talks about sellouts anymore?” – Toby Shorin (link)

“In Trump’s world, you fit into one of three categories. You may be a mark, you may be leverage, you may be a loser. Trump wants to make deals, which means he wants to win deals. His understanding of deal-making is that someone fleeces and someone gets fleeced. It is his ambition to be the fleecer. So you could be his mark, the one he wants to fleece. That’s what the American electorate was in the 2016 election. That’s what Kim Jong Un was recently, which is why Trump didn’t mind flattering him. (As a general rule, if Trump praises you that means he hopes to fleece you.) Or you could be leverage, which is what the children in the Trump/Sessions detention centers are. They are not human beings, they are tokens or counters to be used to try to get a deal with the current mark, which is Congress. But if you attempt in any way to impede the deal, or if you refuse to participate in it, or protest it, or even just call it what it is, you are a loser. In Trump’s world there can be no compassion, no fairness, no justice, no truthtelling, no principles, no standards, no ethics, no convictions, no respect for others, no self-respect, no friends, no allies, no prudence, no thought for the future, no discernment, no wisdom, no religion, no humanity. Only deals. Only marks, leverage, and losers.” – Alan Jacobs (link)

“Another part of me, though, is done with it, with the imperialist ambitions of economics and its tendency to explain away differences, to ignore culture, to exalt reductionism. I want to believe Morson and Schapiro and Desai when they posit that the gap between economics and the humanities can be bridged, but my experience in both writing fiction and studying economics leads me to think that they’re wrong. The hedgehog doesn’t want to learn from the fox. The realist novel is a solemn enemy of equations. The project of reducing behavior to laws and the project of attending to human beings in all their complexity and specifics are diametrically opposed. Perhaps I’m only talking about myself, and this is merely an autobiographical reflection, rather than a general truth, but I think that if I committed any further to economics I would have to give up writing fiction.” – John Lanchester (link)

“Of course, to make it all work the traffickers would have to meet with the DEA after paying the bribe and sign a standard cooperation agreement. Vega would tell them they didn’t have to rat out their friends—they could just put some cocaine on a boat and tell the DEA where to find it. That was a lie: The DEA agents would eventually start demanding names of associates or asking for real smuggling routes. But the beauty of the trap was that the traffickers wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about what happened without revealing they’d flipped. Instead of denouncing Vega as a double-crosser, his marks would brag about how well the bribes worked. The more people Vega conned, the more credibility his system would gain, and the more former marks he’d have as salesmen. It would be like a pyramid scheme of snitches.” – Zeke Faux (link)

“Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.” – Alain de Botton (link)

“Perhaps the best indication of the nature of The Carlyle Group’s business is that each week it receives hundreds of resumes from Washingtonians as free of financial sense, and as frustrated with conventional influence peddling, as its founders once were. “I get resumes from some of the biggest names in town,” says Rubenstein, “lawyers who are making $800,000 a year. They call and say they’ll come and work for free. It’s almost embarrassing.” – Michael Lewis (link)

“The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third—before long the best lines cancel out—and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald (link)

“This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). First uses of a given author or speaker are highlighted in red. Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly-for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.” – Jonathan Lethem (link)

“Today more than ever before men of all races and men of all nations are challenged to be neighborly. The call for a good neighbor policy on the part of the nations of the world is more than an ephemeral shibboleth, it is the call to a way of life which will transform our almost cosmic elegy into creative fulfillment. No longer can we engage in the luxury of passing by on the other side. Such folly was once moral failure; today it can lead only lead to universal suicide. The alternative to a world of brotherhood to match its geographical neighborhood may well be a civilization plunged into an inferno more devastating than anything Dante could ever envision. We cannot long survive living spiritually apart in a world that is geographically one. As you leave this place of worship my friends go out with the conviction that all men are brothers, tied in a single garment of destiny. In the final analysis I must not ignore the wounded man on life’s Jericho Road because he is apart a part of me and I am apart a part of him. His agony diminishes me and his salvation enlarges me.” – Martin Luther King Jr. (link)

“I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” – John Maynard Keynes (link)

“There was a time in mankind’s history—well, prehistory—when being a bully was the only route to the top. We know this, explains Jon Maner, an evolutionary psychologist at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, by deduction. Every last species of animal except Homo sapiens determines pecking order according to physical strength and physical strength alone. This is true of the seemingly congenial dolphin, whose tooth-and-fin battles for status resemble Hobbes’s “war of everyone against everyone.” And it is true even of our closest cousin, the chimpanzee. A human moviegoer could attempt to explain. Because Luke kept getting up out of the dirt, even when he was beat, he won the other prisoners’ respect. But the chimps would just not get it. “That’s a complexity of humans,” Faris says: it was not until after the human-chimpanzee split that Homo sapiens developed a newer, uniquely human path to power. Scholars call it “prestige.” Whether this new, competence-based path to power emerged is not debated by scholars. If it hadn’t, The Iliad wouldn’t have opened with Achilles, the greatest warrior in all of Greece, working for Agamemnon. The question is whether prestige supplanted dominance as the only path to power—or whether the older system also remains operational.” – Jerry Useem (link)

“‘Despair, or folly?’ said Gandalf. ‘It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.’‘ At least for a while,’ said Elrond. ‘The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.’”— J.R.R. Tolkien