Arguments about censorship and ‘no-platforming’ of speakers are often driven by the quest for reputational advantage—on the part of institutions, individuals and social movements—and a need to avoid reputational damage.

the task should be to provide a more accurate diagnosis of the decline of liberal norms, not to deny that anything has changed.

Emotion, which behaviourists traditionally studied in wholly observable terms, becomes exclusively observable, a type of public performance that splits off from the part of the self which, for Honneth, needs to be recognized to be fulfilled as personhood.

the most powerful man in the world, also a celebrity with 73 million Twitter followers, fixating constantly on how unfairly he was being treated, and how he deserved greater recognition—then extinguished

Network effects famously produce power-law distributions, in which a few nodes receive an abundance of connectivity and engagement, while the vast majority receive very little.

processes of representation are replaced by those of curation: a piece of ‘content’ is extracted from the vast archive of data and shared, as a type of investment—or divestment—in a reputation.

Value becomes established not in exchange, but as a speculation on the future, calculated on the basis of data from the past—that is, in terms of reputation.

eventually, ‘public opinion’ became a disembodied, autonomous phenomenon.footnote12

The routinization and industrialization is all at the back-end, where data analytics takes place away from the user’s gaze.

In order that the data they collect can be as rich and extensive as possible, platforms—especially social media—need to be spaces where people engage in something like a struggle for recognition.

the teleology of the platform is to take everything into account.

A novelty of the platform business model is that it allows for market and non-market forms of valuation to be conducted via a single infrastructure.

Third, they are cross-subsidized, offering ‘free’ services on the basis of revenue earned elsewhere. Finally, they take advantage of their data to constantly tweak their interfaces and rules to attract and retain as many users as possible.footnote9

Outside of the market—in education, the arts, the media, healthcare and civil society—metrics, league tables, financial accounting and neo-classical economics are pushed as the lingua franca of public justification. This serves to impose a market-like discipline on spheres of social and cultural exchange, establishing fixed indices of how inequalities of merit and achievement are to be judged. As the public sphere becomes increasingly organized around numerical standards of judgement and justification—surveys, ratings, scoring systems—so the potential reach of the market grows. The struggle for recognition is channelled into the terrain of the calculable.

The pessimistic reading of this was that modern critique was now finished, but the optimistic one was equally unsettling for the left: perhaps the quest for inclusion and respect in the market was just as authentic a struggle as any other.

not adequately recognized by the labour market.

Everybody received equal recognition for having cultural potential, but not for the use they make of it.

There was a precarious dimension to modern subjectivity, in that truth must emerge from within, yet its validation must be granted socially. ‘What has come about with the modern age’, Taylor argued, ‘is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail’.footnote5

communitarian Catholics

In the meantime, remember, depression is real. It's among the worst things that can happen to you. But it is beatable.

Turn it into a story of personal triumph, and repeat that story to yourself.

But this is a very difficult thing to do, because a coherent, believable narrative is a rare thing, and you never quite know what will stick and what will be rejected.

Also, you should realize that just because your depressed friend or family member is unresponsive, that doesn't mean that you aren't doing him or her a lot of good.

Coming out of depression, I've found, is like having your emotional system turned back on. But when it's turning back on, it sputters and backfires. You feel incredibly raw.

Even for many Jews passionately opposed to Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, supporting Palestinian refugee return remains taboo. But, morally, this distinction makes little sense. If it is wrong to hold Palestinians as non-citizens under military law, and wrong to impose a blockade that denies them the necessities of life, it is surely also wrong to expel them and prevent them from returning home. For decades, liberal Jews have parried this moral argument with a pragmatic one: Palestinian refugees should return only to the West Bank and Gaza, regardless of whether that is where they are from, as part of a two-state solution that gives both Palestinians and Jews a country of their own. But with every passing year, as Israel further entrenches its control over all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterannean Sea, this supposedly realistic alternative grows more detached from reality. There will be no viable, sovereign, Palestinian state to which refugees can go. What remains of the case against Palestinian refugee return is a series of historical and legal arguments, peddled by Israeli and American Jewish leaders, about why Palestinians deserved their expulsion and have no right to remedy it now. These arguments are not only unconvincing but deeply ironic, since they ask Palestinians to repudiate the very principles of intergenerational memory and historical restitution that Jews hold sacred. If Palestinians have no right to return to their homeland, neither do we.

Chipotle’s slogan might be “food with integrity,” but its business model is about dishonesty, disrespect, and downright endangerment of workers.

settlers should first look not to the science fiction that influenced the men trying to bring us to those worlds, but to our own world’s polar regions, and ask themselves if they should try that first, instead.

Robinson spoke at a conference a decade ago where he noted that the exploration of Antarctica is a more relevant analog for trying to accurately anticipate extraterrestrial exploration. A trip into the American west was something relatively easy for someone to take on: they could count on being able to find food and supplies on the way, and some sort of economic reward at the end. Expeditions to the South Pole are a far more costly endeavor, one that requires considerable planning, logistics, and supplies to survive in the harsh environment. The South Pole is the only place on Earth without an indigenous population, and is only home to people (anywhere from fifty to two hundred) in research facilities.

In his 2010 paper for the Journal of Cosmology, The Problem of Human Missions to Mars, Dr. Michael F. Robinson highlighted that historical analogies brought to the field of exploration, noting that “when we peel away the ancillary arguments for human spaceflight (e.g. benefits to spinoff technology, employment, or national soft power) we find that core arguments rely heavily upon the use of historical analogies,” and that those associations rely on certain assumptions—that humans have always been explorers, citing examples of how our ancestors have migrated across the world throughout history. But there’s little evidence to support that line of argument, Robinson argues. “The lesson from history appears to show the reverse: that humans have sought out an increasingly settled lifestyle based upon agriculture and industry, foregoing the risks of nomadic travel.” Furthermore, the explorations out of Europe and Asia throughout the global age of exploration weren’t undertaken in the name of romantic discovery: they were for the purpose of commerce, either by discovering new riches to exploit, or by marking out more efficient paths upon which trade could flow. Indeed, even our expeditions into orbit and to the Moon weren’t initially shouldered out of the goal of scientific knowledge: they were demonstrations of American (and Soviet) technological prowess in the midst of a long-term, global arms race.

Feeling isolated, virtual study partners create a sense of fellowship. On Study Web, while stressed, students have accepted their lot—they’re not investigating the rightness or wrongness of the pressurized environment of the Gen Z student or asking whether college is worth it at all. 12-hour Study With Me videos are seen as something to aspire to rather than rebel from. Students accept the premise that school and studying are non-negotiables. Where they come from, where they live, their beliefs and value systems are not barriers to community-building; they suffer in common. 

there’s an inescapable undercurrent of materialism on #StudyTok, suggesting that if you buy the right notebook (Hamelin), pens (MUJI), or keyboard (Moffi), your study problems will be solved.

Whether or not lo-fi music truly helps you study better is debatable, but the science is largely irrelevant to the tens of thousands of listeners who join live streams each day to hear hours-long mixes of different artists evoking a similar sound: a blend of bland, chill, premium mediocre. 

A key feature of these videos is aesthetics—from the right ruler to the perfect pen. Lighting is an important part of a study creator’s vibe: candles, string lights, salt lamps, and neon lights are all common fare.

And—again, this might be the main reason I’m writing this email?—the whole thing is astonishingly televisual. To the film and TV lurkers: GET ON IT.

It’s dark fantasy AND it’s sci-fi AND it’s puzzle fiction AND it’s an Adult Swim cartoon AND it’s wry and sarcastic, a profane Daria in space…! In short, it’s an offering from someone who knows what she likes and was not afraid to put ALL OF IT into a novel. It’s possible a friend or editor at some point cautioned her: Tamsyn, this might be a bit much. (If they didn’t, they probably should have.) And, honestly, if she had loaded the book with a hair less energy, spun the story with a touch less charisma, it WOULD have been too much. But these pages sizzle with energy and charisma; the alchemy succeeds; and what might have been a huge mess becomes a wild hybrid genre. Somber rituals, snarky interjections—it WORKS.

Lately I’ve under­stood the word “ambivalent” in a different way. I think its popular defin­i­tion shifted at some point toward “I don’t have an opinion” or “it really doesn’t matter to me”; a kind of cool, low-energy state. But that’s not what the word means at all. To feel ambiva­lent is to have many thoughts at once, some of them contradictory; to hold them, unresolved, in your head. I find this useful because I feel ambiva­lent about a lot of things!

Regarding Gideon the Ninth, James adds: It’s complex but the plot is tightly constructed and it’s FUNNY in a very sarcastic way. But the world? There’s so much to the world and I’m intimidated by how we’re only really given the edge of everything throughout most of the book.

But the drinking that increased was, almost definitionally, of the stuck-at-home, sad, too-anxious-to-sleep, can’t-bear-another-day-like-all-the-other-days variety—the kind that has a higher likelihood of setting us up for drinking problems down the line. The drinking that decreased was mostly the good, socially connecting kind.

(perhaps the loneliest-sounding drinks of all) premixed, single-serve cocktails

Even drinking in bars has become less social in recent years, or at least this was a common perception among about three dozen bartenders I surveyed while reporting this article. “I have a few regulars who play games on their phone,” one in San Francisco said, “and I have a standing order to just refill their beer when it’s empty. No eye contact or talking until they are ready to leave.” Striking up conversations with strangers has become almost taboo, many bartenders observed, especially among younger patrons. So why not just drink at home? Spending money to sit in a bar alone and not talk to anyone was, a bartender in Columbus, Ohio, said, an interesting case of “trying to avoid loneliness without actual togetherness.”

Almost all of the heavy-drinking women Glaser interviewed drank alone—the bottle of wine while cooking, the Baileys in the morning coffee, the Poland Spring bottle secretly filled with vodka. They did so not to feel good, but to take the edge off feeling bad.

Having combed through decades’ worth of literature, Creswell reports that in the rare experiments that have compared social and solitary alcohol use, drinking with others tends to spark joy and even euphoria, while drinking alone elicits neither—if anything, solo drinkers get more depressed as they drink.

At a talk he later gave on wu-wei at Google, Slingerland made much the same point about intoxication. During the Q&A, someone in the audience told him about the Ballmer Peak—the notion, named after the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that alcohol can affect programming ability. Drink a certain amount, and it gets better. Drink too much, and it goes to hell. Some programmers have been rumored to hook themselves up to alcohol-filled IV drips in hopes of hovering at the curve’s apex for an extended time.

The damage done by alcohol is profound: impaired cognition and motor skills, belligerence, injury, and vulnerability to all sorts of predation in the short run; damaged livers and brains, dysfunction, addiction, and early death as years of heavy drinking pile up. As the importance of alcohol as a caloric stopgap diminished, why didn’t evolution eventually lead us away from drinking—say, by favoring genotypes associated with hating alcohol’s taste? That it didn’t suggests that alcohol’s harms were, over the long haul, outweighed by some serious advantages.

“There is not a safe level of benzene that can exist in sunscreen products,” stated Dr. Christopher Bunick, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Dermatology at Yale University. “Even benzene at 0.1 ppm in a sunscreen could expose people to excessively high nanogram amounts of benzene.”

A December Bank of America Research report called "OK Zoomer" found that the pandemic will impact Gen Z's financial and professional future in the same way that the Great Recession did for millennials. 

Surveys in many countries show that young people would like to be having more children, but face too many obstacles.

Marshall McLuhan once pointed out that the myth of Narcissus is frequently misinterpreted. It is not love that causes the youth to stare at his image, but profound alienation. The point of the myth is that “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.” Stare too long at the objectivized self and you will become the dead matter you behold. The alienation will eventually subside, and you will begin to identify so fully with the daimon that the interior self disappears.

But what do they have to say about us? So little of it is revelatory. This product, the algorithms claim, was purchased by “people like you.” “Since you like dark indie comedies … ”

Writing is no longer considered a technology, but in its early days, it, too, was criticized for distorting a person’s image. The problem, Socrates complains in Plato’s Phaedrus, is that consciousness dies the moment it hits the page. Ask the written words a question, and they will not answer. “They go on telling just the same thing forever.”

For the Greeks, character was fate. The command of the Delphic oracle—“Know thyself”—was not a mandate to plumb the soul but rather to accept the role that nature had assigned you, like an actor accepting a role in the theater. It’s not the kind of advice you hear very often in modern America, but fatalism, as my friend noted, has comforts of its own.

Once you accepted that your character was immediately transparent, there was no pressure to keep up appearances. If I felt nervous about how I was coming off throughout the semester, she advised, I should remember that the students’ minds were already made up. They’d had me figured out before I’d placed my supplies on the desk the first day, and nothing I could do would change it.

But what seems like high technology to us now might seem like a law of nature to future generations. Having forgotten the origin of the computers that permeate their world, people might take them to be an innate feature of the universe.

A mind needs memory. Without it, organisms could only be reactive; they could have no inner life.

Other mammals possess these same brain areas and show analogous behavior.

Neuroscientists have some evidence for the latter. Consciousness seems to be a specific cognitive function performed by identifiable brain mechanisms that not all species possess.

Modern hardware and software have gotten so complicated that they resemble the organic: messy, unpredictable, inscrutable. In machine learning, engineers forswear any detailed understanding of what goes on inside.

A light might fail to turn on or might go out for lack of motion, or maybe for lack of any discernible reason. The house seems to have a mind of its own.

Now “selling out” is tying your online identity to your IRL life and real name.

Another key factor is Gen Z’s rediscovery of PoliticalCompass.org, a Web 1.0 site that, via six sets of prompts with which a user is asked to dis/-identify, generates an approximate position on the Political Compass’s X/Y axis of Left to Right, Authoritarian to Libertarian.

an unwitting loyalty to the platform and, by extension, to the shareholders of Alphabet and Facebook, Inc

Actual power is controlling the means by which lesser power can be displayed—i.e., congrats on the 500K likes on your polling numbers, @jack still owns all your tweets.

it’s a swarm-led form of para-governance programmed to maximize engagement while obfuscating responsibility for the social and environmental damage it wreaks

the internet, a massively lucrative space of capitalization, profits off the personal expression and political conflict of its users

Writing is a form of communication, without an audience it gets lost and meanders to and fro. Just like music, poetry, a conversation or a tree falling in the forest, without a witness writing doesn't exist. If you write a diary but never read it, you never wrote that diary. If you write an email but it isn't delivered, you never wrote that email. If you write a blog entry but even the Googlebot doesn't visit, then you never wrote that blog entry. Writing is predicated on consumption.

And while I do not want to officially dictate how my projects are used, I wish to make things a bit more low profile, and encourage listeners to experiement with other, more personally responsible, controlled, contextual and meaningful forms of distribution and support. In other words, I wished to quietly keep the music acting queerly. Sadly, my actions, which were in some way intended as a gesture of humility and smallness, were transformed into arrogant property claims.

I could only think of the night before, and how wonderful it would have been to meet someone that excited and curious because they couldn't find any sound examples online, and positioned that absence in relation to something being "underground."

I call them assholes, because whenever I play a track they cannot identify they insist I tell them what it is - and get really angry when I refuse... which invariably means as soon as their app identifies another track they are back in my face, smugly, like, "How ya like me now, bitch? Thought you lost me there for a minute, didn't you?" There are no kudos for a DJ finding a special offline track to share with the dancers in that moment. Club goers have increasingly little desire to process the club experience in reality - only via online devices. It's social-media-online-app-smart-phone-always-online-fuck-you-I-own-this-world culture at its most annoying, and ultimately most meaningless.

Maybe because, as a result of the climate they have created, these days my website is to their social media what the 'mom and pop shop' is to the shopping mall.

Rather, they are about an eradication of any specificity of context and audience that occurs when information is shared through populist models of making all information available to everyone.

I did not wish to act like an anti-piracy agent

I presented them with all of the links on their website that I had followed when filing my removal request, proving that there was no mention anywhere about claimants being publicly named - which they duly ignored. I asked if they could at least remove my name from the copyright claim notices (ie., editing it down to just "no longer available" or "no longer available due to a copyright claim"), but they said they could not.

replacing removed videos with a statement like, "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Terre Thaemlitz." YouTube and the rest are such corporate zombies that they can't imagine there being any other basis for someone wanting content removed

I strongly believe that, in the face of today's dominant internet strategies which emphasize populism, there is a real necessity to cultivate offline forms of digital culture. This means sharing information in more controlled and precise ways than generic upload-archiving, such as through hard formats or direct and encrypted file transfer between known persons. People become so indoctrinated in dominant cultural nonsense about information's value only being determined by the breadth of its distribution, that we have culturally lost skills for understanding secrets, and their protective power. This is even happening in queer and transgendered communities, which historically rely on strategies that step in and out of closets...

What possible reason could there be for continuing to list pages of removed content months after the fact?

Meanwhile, in my own authorial practices, I attempt to be openly hypocritical.

their only real concern was that any content in Wikipedia must be usable for free throughout perpetuity... but in the realm of copyright, aren't 'perpetuity clauses' the first sign of a bad contract? Doesn't the very concept of perpetuity bely one party's desire to unfairly control, and an absence of trust?

Part of the blame also lays with copyleft, which uses near fundamentalist fervor to argue that "sharing" only exists outside of the realm of copyright

However, it was not for the usual reasons, such as a fear of lost royalties, or a legal reassertion of authorship rights.

you can't keep original or profound meanings intact

this ever-receding past or future in which I am good at talking to people, in which I can love the people I love skillfully and generously and in which I can be loved without condition, in which I have enough money to no longer be worried all the time, in which I am beautiful enough not to be angry at everyone anymore

Lately this is my attitude toward my own life as well, or the one I had before last March, which now appears to me only as a long list of things I took for granted. I feel guilty when I talk about how much I miss parties. I was often terrible at them, nervously failing to make conversation, cancelling plans or hoping someone else would cancel. I felt all the time like an overdue and unfinished assignment, I promise I’ll be done soon, just let me stay home until I am. Let me just wait until I look better, until I have more money, until I’m more successful, until nothing is wrong.

Nothing looks like the past so much as the things that were supposed to look like the future. The 1970s thought it was the future; it is the last decade for which I was not alive at all. Perhaps this part of the past seems idyllic and permissive to people my age specifically because we were not part of it; it is a landscape free of ourselves, free of the limits and facts of our lives, our bodies, and our histories. If only we could get back to a place before ourselves, we could shake free of the things that obligate us, that make us petty and small and unkind.

That scenario has been part of every conversation we’ve had about how all of this is going to go; it’s hideous and very real and we do not pretend otherwise. But if we don’t imagine how it can be different, and how we can actively resist that capitalism’s natural inclination, then we surrender to that vision.

they’re maintained by the state, aka your company

most people do still want to see their co-workers in some capacity

When we’re no longer confined to our homes, just think of all the options that will open to you: you can work at a coffee shop, of course, but you can also work…..with your friends? A lot?

the camera would cut back to Stewart, his face frozen in some emoji mask of shock: eyes wide, mouth agape.

TikTok enables, for video and audio, the type of combinatorial evolution that Brian Arthur describes as the underlying mechanism of the tech industry's innovation.

Someone told me that if you watch TikTok for over an hour it posts a warning asking you to consider taking a break. I'm not sure if that's the case

I find some comfort sometimes when I find some TikTok that feels so catered to my tastes that it must be a micro-niche and then see it has millions of likes.

I still think Instagram is a more welcoming home for pure thirst trap content than TikTok, where, if you want to honeytrap the simps, you're going to have to dance for it.

it's staggering to ponder how many more videos TikTok would have if its video editor were more usable.

TikTok is the modern MTV because (1) it increases consumption of music tracks that go viral on its platform as sounds and (2) any number of songs will forever summon the accompanying meme and visual choreography from my memory.

Until later in life, children think you should know exactly what they're feeling, and it takes a bit of coaxing to tease out their inner emotional state.

What Ricky Desktop talks about above is a different process in which he scores to visuals that only exist in his imagination, generic dance tropes like "pretend to play the flute".

TikTok's "OODA loop" is collective and distributed, and it spins thousands of times faster than that of big media.

TikTok's needs to improve its search ranking algorithm. Trying to find popular TikTok's I remembered seeing back in the day was much harder than it should have been using TikTok's native search. A couple that I wanted to use I just couldn't locate, and even Google and YouTube didn't turn them up (a thing you realize after trying to do it more than once is how hard it is to create a comprehensible search query for certain TikTok's).

Another feature I wish TikTok would add is the ability to sort by descending popularity on any grid of videos, like on sound or profile pages. Please.

Of course, we're all just in our FYP feeds, which just scrolls up endlessly, so it isn't an actual space. But we trust the visible view counts as evidence FYP is doing its job getting many of us with the same tastes in front of the same videos, and so this evidence of common knowledge creates a liminal third place that exists [waves hands at the air in front of me] out there. I’ve tended to think of social networks as being built by people assembling a graph of people bottoms up, but perhaps I’ve been too narrow-minded. TikTok might not qualify by that definition, but it feels social, with FYP as village matchmaker.

That's why opening the comments and finding that one of the first few comments perfectly encapsulates your reaction, then seeing it already has tens or hundreds of thousands of likes, is so comforting. This confirmation of a shared response creates, asynchronously, a passing score on a form of the Voight-Kampff test. It's a checksum on your humanity.

Reading the comments on TikTok serves a communal function. It's like hearing the laughter of the crowd at a comedy show.

One measure of a platform's power is the number of things people make with it that you had never been made before. Every week, I find videos on TikTok that I can't imagine having been made on any other app.

TikTok comments are a form of distributed annotation.

a mix of a centrally planned economy and a free market

The Discover page acts as the Fed in the central economy of memes on TikTok, while the FYP algorithm is the interest rate on meme distribution.

This is why TikTok's network effects of creativity matter. To clone TikTok, you can't just copy any single feature. It's all of that, and not just the features, but how users deploy them and how the resultant videos interact with each other on the FYP feed.

a form of assisted evolution

at least on TikTok there is a chance, with time stamps and some of the literal links the app creates between videos, to trace the origin of memes more easily.

Given we know innovation compounds as more ideas from more people collide, it's stunning how many tech firms, even ones that ostensibly tout the value of openness, have launched services that do a better job of letting their users exchange ideas than any internal tool does for their own employees’ ideas.

Most of the best ideas in tech first appeared in science fiction books in the 1960s, and many of those are still waiting for their time to come

Gossip litigates and fleshes out the boundaries of acceptable behavior within groups. Whereas gossip used to be contained, social networks now give it global distribution.

Yes, there's no reason you need to react to everything. But it's human nature. This is the social contract of the social media era. If you dare to shout your opinion or publish your work to the masses, the masses can choose to shout back.

This is another of the nested feedback loops within the global feedback loop that is the FYP talent show. Once one example of this went viral, then the entire community adopted this as one of the norms of the community.

Knowing that TikTok has a Stitch feature, you can also post a question in a video and expect that some number of people will use Stitch an answer to your question and distribute that as a new video.

By network effects of creativity, I mean that every additional user on TikTok makes every other user more creative. This exists in a weak form on every social network and on the internet at large. The connected age means we are exposed to so much from so many more people than at any point in human history. That can't help but compound creativity.

This piece is long, but if you get bored in any one section, you can just scroll on the next one; they're separated by horizontal rules for easy visual scanning. You can also read them out of order. There are lots of cross-references, though, so if you skip some of the segments, others may not make complete sense. However, it’s ultimately not a big deal.

The notion that scientific theories vie with one another in open competition overlooks the fact that research ambitions and funding choices are shaped by both big-p and small-p politics. There is a reason why more scientific progress has been made in drugs for the treatment of diseases of wealth than of poverty.

science was a special example of the general liberal virtues that can be cultivated only in the absence of tyranny.

if a scientist explains nuclear technology to a bellicose despot, but leaves the ethical choice of deployment to the despot, we wouldn’t say that the scientist had acted responsibly.

A darker way of rendering the Popper vs Strangelove story is to say that falsification offers moral non-accountability to its adherents. A scientist can never be accused of supporting the wrong cause if their work is not about confirmation. Popper himself declared that science is an essentially theoretical business. Yet it was a naïve scientist working during the Cold War who didn’t realise the significance of their funding source and the implications of their research.

Strangelove struck at the heart of Popperian ideals, an unreconstructed Nazi operating at the military-industrial nerve-centre of the ‘free world’. As such, he reflected the real-life stories of Nazi war criminals imported by Operation Paperclip to the US to assist in the Cold War effort – a whitewashing project uncovered as early as 1951 by The Boston Globe. Against such a backdrop, the epistemic modesty of Popperian science was appealing indeed. Real scientists, in the Popperian mode, abjured all politics, all truths. They didn’t attempt to know the atom, still less to win wars. They merely attempted to disprove things.

A fan favorite is when she soups up the classic vanilla custard filling with a torched crème brûlée ($4) on top of the doughnut, a smoky, sugary sheen to go with a creamy filling with flecks of vanilla beans.

Their less-sexy lineup is a better catch: apple-cinnamon pound cake with a dollop of brandy cream, the puck-sized apricot Stilton financier and the pâté à choux with Earl Grey cream for starters.

I think it’s true for so many commercial spaces that beautiful women add value, by virtue of adding beauty into the logic of styling things and selling things. In the idea of ‘parasexuality’, a concept that Bailey came up with when he was looking at barmaidens in nineteenth-century England, he was thinking about how, even within strict norms of sexual morality, the presence of beautiful women in a commercial setting would raise all kinds of titillating prospects that might violate those codes of what was sexually appropriate. That is how ‘parasexuality’ works – it is not fully deployed sex like ‘sex work’, but there is something about their sexual availability that gets put to work in these commercial settings. You can see it in what in sociology today we would call aesthetic labour: the uses of women, and men, but especially women’s bodies, in everything – hotels, Hooters, you name it.

Veblen was inspired by these anthropologies of what was called the ‘potlatch’: nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest tribal societies in which there would be elaborate feasts, and nobles of tribes would compete with each other to see who could hold a bigger feast, who could waste more food, who could burn more blankets or other kinds of rare goods. And by going through that potlatch ritual a noble could assert his rank. It had lasting consequences: in humiliating a rival, claiming one’s title and gaining respect in the community.

what they say is how they want to be perceived (and perhaps how they want to perceive themselves), but what they do – in the moment – can be very different. So if I’d just done observations, I could have just said that these were clueless rich jerks. And if I’d just done interviews, I would have concluded they were actually very thoughtful, very reflective people who want to be good people.

a liberating, nonjudgmental permissiveness

We’ll settle for electability, for hand sanitizer, for something less than violence in the streets.

He often reminded readers that they were more than individuals; they were, in fact, pieces of a society.

Lavery, who was raised evangelical, is morally firm and comically decisive, chiding and scolding like a fresh-faced Judge Judy. A husband who refuses to use enough soap on the dishes is committing “an insult to your dignity and your personhood,” and a crazed DVD reviewer is “behaving like the majordomo of a small European country on the precipice of World War I.”

Sugar suggested, in the mold of Montaigne—or perhaps psychotherapy—that the solution to your problems lay within you, provided you confront them with honest introspection and brutal clarity, if not the force of revelation. The goal wasn’t proper napkin etiquette or resolving a dispute with your mother-in-law. It was saving your soul.

questionably cute animal videos

Dorset, England