Thoughts I Live With

• You do not have to wait for someone to rebuild what you lost. You are standing in it. —Terry Godier

• Every political project carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Its tensions, contradictions, limitations -- and ultimately its demise -- are baked in from the start. The sociocultural zeitgeist into which it is born, together with the quality of its thinking and leadership, determine its longevity. —Neal Lawson

• [W]ars don’t arise from personal relationships. They arise from ideas -- from the accretion, and corruption, of ideas over time. —James Verini

• At first, he might have just wanted to have fun. But he was a decent man pressed into service by indecent times, living proof that a person can weather the worst life has to dish out without losing their mind, or their soul. —Sam Adams

• The app stops being a way to engage with the hobby and instead turns the hobby into a way to engage with the app. From the outside, the hobby still looks the same -- you're still running, or watching an art film, or peeping a bufflehead sea duck through your binoculars -- but the goal is no longer the experience itself. —Tyler Austin Harper

• PTSD is like going through hell, but you've just got to keep going. You can get treatment, you can talk to people, but the person who helps you most is yourself. —David Nott

• Economists love data, but truly great economists know how to conjure a compelling narrative from the numbers. —Zachary D. Carter

• [A] place forever caught, like the whole country, between a vision of who we aspire to be and an anxiety about who we really are. —Carla Sosenko

• I often wonder whether hope is a simple matter of elevation: if how far you can see before the last horizon determines how much you can imagine the world containing -- and how much you think it contains for you. —Erin L. McCoy

• Most of us are, in some way, dislocated figures living deracinated lives. —Tom McTague

• Writing isn't just the production of sentences -- it's the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It's a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. —Micah Nathan

• In shame cultures, individuals were punished publicly for the infraction of social norms, whereas in guilt cultures new institutions punished and regulated behavior outside public view. On this view, the infliction of shame compels an individual to change their sense of self, whereas the attribution of guilt compels a change only in a specified domain of action. —Jake Subryan Richards

• [T]he process of polarization, if not contained or channeled through an explicit democracy-rebuilding program, creates a vicious cycle: It changes the incentives for political actors and voters alike in ways that lead them to sacrifice democratic principles rather than risk losing power. —Jennifer McCoy + Murat Somer

• America is indeed a land of opportunity, at least in the sense that here you always have the opportunity to escape from what you hate or to balance it with what you like. —Stanisław Barańczak

• Whoever has land, has conflict. —French proverb

• Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, / Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, —Alfred Tennyson

• [D]emonstrate that you know what you want, have what it takes to get there, say what you mean, and mean what you say. —Fred Kaplan