Sublime

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well:

Park Slope, Brooklyn, is just a microcosm of the slippery slope upon which so many of us are finding ourselves these days. We live in a landscape tilted toward a set of behaviors and a way of making choices that go against our own better judgment, as well as our collective self-interest. Instead of collaborating with each other to ensure the best p

Even when you know someone well, I find that if you don’t talk about the little things on a regular basis, it’s hard to talk about the big things.

The “deeply rooted community” is, in reality, at least as often as not, a cesspit of nasty gossips, an echo chamber in which minor misunderstandings amplify until they prevent people from seeing each other accurately, or at all. As for the identities that drive so much of our politics, they are a necessary part of the naming and dismantling of spec

Je ne souhaite pas consacrer trop de temps à décrire cette culture de l’individualisme, de l’authenticité, de l’autonomie et de l’isolement, car d’autres l’ont fait avec brio : Philip Rieff, dans The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Christopher Lasch dans The Culture of Narcissism, Gail Sheehy dans Passages, Alasdair McIntyre dans Après la vertu, Tom Wo

In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.

In the class structure of Smart America, meritocrats occupy an important level. Above them sit the always-getting-richer very rich, whom they regard with loathing and envy, and at whom they direct a continuous barrage of critical fire. Most of the books and columns and gossip aimed at the 1 percent come from people just a few percentage points belo