“As a consequence of always tending to others, very little space is left for the child to know or express her own needs. The only legitimate needs seem to be those of others. Expressing her own needs is met with frustration, anger or other parental emotions that link her needs with fear and shame.”
“Whenever COVID-19 cases doubled, climate-related tweets dropped by about 5 percent. The doubling of COVID-19 deaths saw climate tweeting decline by over 7 percent. … [A] big boost in case counts could easily offset the arrival of a major hurricane.”
“Looking back, what I had actually done is uncover evidence of the video’s supposed legacy, rather than evidence of the inciting incident. I assumed that because multiple people independently told me the same thing, that thing was true.”
“Worse, the ‘dog-pushers’ — the lowest-level scammers who initiate conversations with victims — are often workers from around the region, tricked into indentured servitude, held captive in dormitories and offices, and beaten by the managers and bosses.”
“It still isn’t clear whether people experience infantile amnesia because we can’t form autobiographical memories, or whether we just have no way to retrieve them. No one knows for sure what’s going on, but scientists have a few guesses.”
“Another course — a citrus foam — was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. Absent utensils, we were told to lick it out of the chef’s mouth in a scene that I’m pretty sure was stolen from an eastern European horror film.”
“[A] central theme of this story is that expectations move slower than reality on the ground. That was true when people clung to 1950s expectations as the economy changed over the next 35 years. And even if a middle-class boom began today, expectations that the odds are stacked against everyone but those at the top may stick around.”
(This is interesting and insightful, but I link to it with a very large caveat: It erases minorities from the story.)
“The end product is an internet-native sport that doesn’t need any of the troublesome real-life human players who are bound to disappoint us with their bad behavior. Instead, fans create narratives for players, inventing histories and team culture to surround and explain the random, simulation-based events of the game.”
“[C]onversion disorder, or mass psychogenic illness, as it is also known, is essentially stress that strikes a close-knit group, like an embassy under siege, and behaves epidemiologically — that is, it spreads like an infection.”