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- The moral goal of writing is not to change other peoples’ minds, it’s to change your own mind. This difference between the moralist and the stylist: the moralist is interested in manipulating you, the stylist interested in learning from you. Great writing hears the response of the future audience it is writing for.
- Want to see something disturbing? Look at married Millennials posting about their marriage on social media. Or wait — on second thought — don’t.
- Whenever you hear someone complaining about capitalism, understand that what they’re doing is tacitly asking your approval: they want to be thought of us as revolutionary, without doing anything revolutionary. The second you hear someone complain about capitalism, you can assume they love capitalism. Also — what is ‘capitalism?’ A lazy abstraction.
- Whenever you hear someone talking about how Trump’s NEEDS TO BE IMPEACHED, you can assume that what they’re really telling you is that they want someone else to take care of the business of political participation for them. Impeachment is the fantasy of armchair activists, the heroin of political news junkies who can’t get enough.
- Trump will never be impeached for the same reason that reality shows never end (if they’re popular).
- Political passion increases in an inverse relationship to intelligence.
- Reading is a relatively new invention; we have no reason to believe literacy will survive into the future — that its existence is guaranteed.
