DANGER POINT

Part of the magic of parental love — its ballast, its power — is that your family will always be there for you. Their love will build for you a steadfast home in your heart, and the stability of that home will give you the strength and the sense of self required to extract yourself from bad situations when you need to leave. Harris never quite had that. No parent, like Kathleen Bouchard, was determined and able to wrest him away from risk. Instead, even in prison Harris felt a duty to take care of his mother. He worried about not being able to provide for her “on top of all of this.”

“The odds are the odds,” Wood said. “They were just computer picks,” Marge chimed in. “There’s no magic to a computer pick,” Wood continued. “It was perfectly legal. It’s the American way.” “I look for tendencies,” Jerry said. “That’s all. Nothing guaranteed.” Marge, who recently turned 80, was eating pancakes. She had poured so much sugar on top that there was almost no pancake visible beneath the crust of white. She’d always known, she said, that the caper couldn’t last forever. And there had been so many queasy moments of risk and uncertainty along the way. But now, without the game, life was a little emptier. “I really do miss it,” she said. “I’m too young to quit working.”

The founder of Instagram has envisioned it as “the nicest place online,” which sounds a lot like an advertising slogan, which is perhaps the point. It is holding up a mirror and seeing itself, just as Instapoetry has taught it to, just as it has taught Instapoetry to.

Harold Bloom described canonical writing as that which demands rereading, William Empson that it needs to work for readers with divergent opinions, provoking a variety of responses and interpretations. All of this implies a richness, a complexity, a variety of strata. The majority of Instapoetry has none of this. It is almost exclusively a banal vessel of self-care, equivalent to an affirmation, designed for young women of a certain privileged position and disposition, one that is entirely self-absorbed.

This poetry is not poor because it is genuine, it is poor because that is all it is.

According to one of the best supported theories in psychology, self-determination theory, humans have three basic needs: a sense of autonomy, a sense of competence, and a sense of relatedness

Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country “more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember,” a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian’s home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers would disagree.

But racism occupies a mostly passive place in Packer’s essay. There’s no attempt to understand why black and brown workers, victimized by the same new economy and cosmopolitan elite that Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution.

What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism.

The name Barack Obama does not appear in Lilla’s essay, and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics—the possibility of the first black president—that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care.

But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.

What was important was the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation of white workers to the level of “negers.”

But if you simply correct the error, or make a petty subtweet, all the energy will be dissipated. For curiosity to be realized, pettiness must be suppressed and transformed into energy, gleeful malevolence transformed to honorable ends.

Found out that all my instapaper highlights get shared here minus the comments, so now it looks like I’m super stoked on The Dark Enlightenment/Nick Land.

She turned her life into art—award-winning, apartment-buying, wildly popular art—which is something I’m still trying to do.

Like juicing—another Kale Age method of expedient renewal—ayahuasca is appreciated for its efficiency

Because grievance status is awarded as political compensation for economic incompetence