Monday night as I was biking home in the early darkness of a December evening, I felt a surprising moment of affection for… my bicycle light.
Philosophy
How Does My Wife Rock? I Count Some Ways…
While I was working on that epic piece about marginal and average tax rates (I know, right?) my wife IMd me. It went a little something like this:
The Beauty of Being Offended
Although this had never occurred to be before today, I now believe that there is something deeply beautiful in the human capacity to feel offended.
I’ve spent far, far too many hours debating politics online. Along the way I’ve been offended quite a few times, and I dare say I’ve dished out more than I’ve taken. Back in the day I took a confrontational approach to debating controversial issues, and I had a couple of theories–long since abandoned–to rationalize what I was doing.
How to Live Without Irony
As you can tell from my first post, I’m deeply suspicious of irony, and so I loved Christy Wampole’s courageously non-ironic article for NYT’s Opinionator. “Ironic living is a first-world problem,” she writes. “For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn’t own anything he possesses.” The solution, she quotes a friend, is that “Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.” Read the whole thing and let me know if you agree.
Mind the Gaps
Every so often as a teenager I would feel overcome by personal failures. This would culminate in an evening spent in recrimination and prayer as I tried to stoke the embers of idealism against the chill of disappointment. After a few hours of listening to my favorite music, I would feel renewed fiery ambition. In that spirit of fervor, I often scribbled hasty notes full of schedules and goals to guide my new life. At last I would go to sleep secure in my hopeful exhaustion that this time would be different. And yet each time I rose the following morning to look at the notes I had left myself, they seemed as foreign as if they’d been written by an alien hand. I had passed through the low valley and traversed the high peak, and both had left me unscathed. For good or for ill nothing had changed. I was as I had always been.