Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

This is of course not the case for everyone, but for plenty of women, becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission: being prepared, through a rush of attention and a series of gender-resegregated rituals—the bridal shower, the bachelorette party, and, later, the baby shower—for a future in which your identity will be systematically

don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment, but whenever I want.

for the final law to this effect to be struck down. “Married women,” wrote Justice Joe Henry, “have labored under a form of societal compulsion and economic coercion which has not been conducive to the assertion of some rights and privileges of citizenship.”

Like Jane, Emma has been broken by the cultural psychosis that tells women to cram a lifetime’s supply of open self-interest into a single, incredibly expensive day.

The war also gave jewelry companies a lasting boon. Attempts to market engagement rings for men had previously flopped, as such rings were incompatible with the still-prevalent idea that engagement is a thing that men do to women. But in a war context, the male wedding band started to seem logical: with a wedding band, men could cross the ocean wea

He was elected for the same reason that people buy lottery tickets. It’s not the actual possibility of victory that you pay for; it’s the fleeting vision of victory.

The model of business success in the millennial era is that of dismantling social structures to suck up cash from whatever corners of life can still be exploited. Uber and Airbnb have been

Efficiency at this scale requires extreme devaluation. To use Amazon—which I did regularly for years, with full knowledge of its labor practices—is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible, even, and maybe particularly, people.

George Packer in 2014, in a New Yorker piece detailing Amazon’s takeover of the book industry. With this data,