“Women, who are objects of simultaneous worship and disgust in the public eye, become both victim and villain.”

The Zen Buddhists have a word, “koan,” which means “unsolvable riddle”:

The mind has never been perfectly rational, but rather resource-rational—aimed at reconciling our finite time, limited memory storage, and distinct craving for events to feel meaningful.

parental absence exacerbated participants’ inclinations toward celebrity worship.

“We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy.”

Judging someone through the lens of the halo effect, our minds cast them in the same one-dimensionally warm glow, telling us to trust them wholesale, when they’ve objectively given us little reason to.

those who “worshipped” people they really knew, like parents and teachers who could make tangible contributions to their lives, had overall higher self-esteem and educational achievement. Glorifying pop stars and athletes predicted the opposite—lower confidence, weaker sense of self. This finding supports the “absorption addiction model” of celebri

Learning to stomach a sense of irresolution might be the only way to survive this crisis.

Taylor of using allyship as an aesthetic… and they get mad at her for not doing what they want… but she’s a capitalist to her core. Most of her security team is ex–Special Forces, ex-FBI, or other former law enforcement officers. I’m not sure why fans expect her to be all, ‘Defund the police! Tear down the system that made my dream come true.’… It’