​"Tacky, as a concept, refers to the lack of cultivation or the resistance to taste, and more often than not refers to tastes that are not suitably conservative. Furthermore, tacky is more likely to be feminine, ethnic, queer, deviant; not manly, not practical, not businesslike, not serious."

"Toxic masculinity is a social script, that tells men and boys that the right way to be a man is to be violent, emotionally unavailable, and sexually agressive. It is a narrow, confining definition of a man that shuts off a vast range of human experiences. It tells them what pursuits are worthy, what styles are acceptable."

​

"Would you like to expand on that a little?"

"No."

Sensory pleasure and endless consumption

Fleabag: [to her dad] Oh fuck it, I have a horrible feeling that I'm a greedy perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can't even call herself a feminist.

Why do we need more than 24 hours in a day?

Since the birth of civilization, tyrannical rulers have plagued mankind. Driven by an insatiable appetite for power such individuals have done their best to control both the minds and bodies of their subjects. Seen in this light, the history of civilization is very much a history of varying degrees of human enslavement.

Given the role they play in our lives, do our devices deserve the same protections as our brains and bodies?

The realization that humans are not individual, discrete entities but rather the outcome of ever-changing interactions with microorganisms has consequences beyond the biological disciplines. In particular, it calls into question the assumption that distinctive human traits set us apart from all other animals––and therefore also the traditional disciplinary divisions between the arts and the sciences.

We've all found ourselves in conversation and felt attacked like we started off talking about one thing and then the other person twisted our words and before we knew it, we lost our cool, lost respect in their eyes, and maybe even acted like a jerk.

When I got depressed for the first time, at age 27, what surprised me most was the sheer physicality of it. My arms and legs, numb and pendulous as dumbbells, resisted my half-hearted attempts to animate them, and my perception was equally leaden. Taking in the world felt like gazing through a stained-glass pane, trying to make out the wavy shapes on the other side.

The Internet Creators Guild, invented by Hank Green and Laura Chernikoff, looks cool, but it symbolises some problems that I have with YouTube, “the YouTube community,” and Silicon Valley more generally – it’s a kind of bourgeois technocratic liberalism.

For essayists and philosophers, what we cannot forgive is, first, the suspicion that our writer has a personal axe to grind, and second, perhaps even worse, dullness, a lack of panache. The slightest feeling that facts are being manipulated in order to support a position in which, for some spoilsport reason, the author has a personal investment, is fatal. The reader, that is, must recognize that a genuine truth is being acknowledged. 

This is a puzzling idea, for someone to become ‘not the same person any more’. The phrase smacks of philosophy – perhaps even obscurity. Yet it is simultaneously apt, capturing the emotive sense of no longer recognising someone whom we once knew. Many have witnessed someone they loved change so profoundly that the person remaining seems an entirely different one.

And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it — by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. 

When you see someone run through a red light, it’s natural to think: ‘Wait, you can’t do that!’ And, by this, I don’t just mean that it was wrong to do that. If I did, I’d have said: ‘Wait, you shouldn’t do that!’ Instead, there’s a way in which we really meant that they can’t do that.