“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
To feel safe, you need to control what the people around you are going to say and do. This is not achieved by going after the root causes of violence. This is not even achieved by working to slowly improve social conditions. It is achieved through silence and disappearance, by moving the offending object or person out of sight. . . . [However] [d]o we want to live in...
“I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same...
For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be...
Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds (including marriage) cannot last when this is the prevailing logic. Most of us are unclear about what to do to protect and strengthen caring bonds when our self-centered needs are not being met. It still took...
But they were tired old men who lacked the energy, will and imagination to deal with a crisis they knew was upon them. The decision-makers in the Kremlin were all in their late sixties or seventies and mostly in poor health. The Boss – more capo di capi than Tsar – was still Leonid Brezhnev, now seventy-six. The others all deferred to him, even when he...
This is a book I wish I had come across a decade or so ago. The unhappiness of men in relationships, the grief men feel about the failure of love, often goes unnoticed in our society precisely because the patriarchal culture really does not care if men are unhappy. When females are in emotional pain, the sexist thinking that says that emotions should and can matter...
People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So...
I read this book for debate on the 2015-16 debate topic, and it didn’t disappoint as a resource for some excellent impact cards. This litany of economic and political risks might be enough to cause observers to alter their long-term assumptions about Asia’s prospects. Yet there is a fifth risk to be mapped, the most dangerous of all: war and peace. How close is...
I read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates last year shortly after it was released, but had the opportunity to read it again with my AP Language class this year, where it sparked some really interesting conversation and debate. While I highlighted some thought provoking, engaging, enraging, or beautiful passage on almost every page of the book, these are...