“Respondents explained that they found spellings with u to be less confusing because that spelling kept the initial letter in common with usual — as long as a silent e was there at the end to cue the pronunciation of the u away from the sound in untie. I find this resolution elegant in its clunkiness: Solving the problem of two unwritten sounds by writing a further, unpronounced letter is a truly Englishy solution.”
“Think of it this way: SARS-CoV-2, the virus, causes COVID-19, the disease — and it doesn’t have to. Vaccination can disconnect the two.”
“If there is any reason for hope in the growing epidemic of long COVID, it is that some academic medical centers are taking these patients seriously and tailoring treatment to them. Medicine’s history with hard-to-identify chronic illnesses, particularly those that mainly affect women, has not been a good one.”
“Roosevelt and his advisers never had a master plan. Rather, in the administration’s first 100 days, they implemented a flurry of laws and regulations. If those programs worked, they remained. If they didn’t, they were dropped, to be replaced by others.”
“Right now, the best we can do is an ad hoc defense of democracy. Begin by rejecting the temptation to think that this election will carry on as elections usually do. Something far out of the norm is likely to happen. Probably more than one thing.”
“Clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, its sexual repressiveness, and its hierarchical power based on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction.”
“Once you internalize the possibility that you’re being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. … By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you’re too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.”
“The Nazis were dedicated trolls who weaponized their insincerity to take advantage of liberal societies ill-equipped to confront them. This was not done just for political advantage—rather, the insincerity itself was a moral act, an expression of contempt for the weak.”
“An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet: Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance.”
“Ironically, when adults cite ‘Look for the helpers’, they are saying something tragic, not hopeful: Grown-ups now feel so disenfranchised that they implicitly self-identify as young children.”