The medium chill

Why do we always remember our childhood friends? Why do so many people look back on college with fondness? Why are so many married couples nostalgic for those hardscrabble early years, with the crappy jobs and tiny apartment and borrowed baby clothes? It’s because, while those environments were materially constrained (we had fewer choices), they yi... See more

satisficing: abandoning the quest for the ideal in favor of the good-enough

And in America, no matter how much you’ve got, someone next to you has more. This is what Chris Hayes once described to me as “fractal inequality.” America’s top 10 percent are far, far better off than the other 90 percent, but the top 1 percent is far, far better off than the 10 percent, and the 0.01 percent is far, far better off than the 1 perce... See more