Sam Smith

Children, markets are not unique to capitalism. They existed before capitalism, they exist outside capitalism, and they will exist when capitalism is dead. LENIN wanted markets. Unfortunately he died and Stalin disagree. I think LENIN knew what communism was.

A grumpy man can control a family without ever raising his voice. He just has to make his displeasure expensive enough. A long silence at dinner. A ruined car ride. Soon, everyone starts pre-adjusting. The kids are told “not now” before they can ask. She chooses the restaurant he likes, the movie he won’t complain through, the route that avoids traffic because traffic makes him unbearable. This is how a household becomes organized around one person’s refusal to regulate themselves.

Every time I see old couples, I always wonder how many times they’ve forgiven each other.

"No one has ever been a success betting against America since 1776 — and they're not going to be a success in the future doing it, either." – Warren Buffett

It's not surprising that professors come from highly educated families. Yet the extent to which the professoriate comes from families w/ a PhD-holding mother or father is striking. While <1% of Americans have a PhD, 22% of university faculty members have a parent with a Ph.D.

Game theory is fun, but there is actually a neat deontological basis for both choices, ethically. The "everyone survives" cases are 1) everyone presses red, 2) a majority press blue. Since "everyone presses blue" contains 2, both choices survive Kant's categorical imperative.

Iranian state-affiliated media reports that the Central Bank of Iran would have received toll payments from ships transiting through the Strait. The payments would have been made in fiat currency (not crypto).

Vance and Iran's Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf arrived in Islamabad at dawn on Wednesday - al-Hadath cites Pakistani time

Rings of Power Season 3 has cast Jamie Campbell Bower as a "handsome high-born knight" and potential new love interest for Galadriel. In Tolkien's text, Galadriel has been married to Celeborn since the First Age. She does not have a succession of love interests. The show invented Celeborn's death in Season 1 to give her a romance with a character who turned out to be Sauron. Season 2 pulled half the audience of Season 1. The show is still running. Three seasons in, has Rings of Power earned the right to keep rewriting Tolkien?

Dear readers, Please don’t be fooled. The author will comment and retweet this to try and convince you that books that make you think are too complex, too long, a thing of the past. They want to convince you that you don’t need them and that you should be reading 90-page-shoot ‘em up-novellas. They want your attention span to continue to shrink so that they can sell you 4 books a year that they rush through writing. They want you to look Pulitzer Prize winner like THE GOLDFINCH and say “800 pages? That’s too long” because then you aren’t reading their books. But if you don’t, you’ll lose so much about life, about humanity. Don’t let them do this to you. Books are like paintings. They are meant to be lingered on, dissected, spoken to, and shared. Don’t let them take that away from you. It’s all we have left. - KF

Is there a special word to describe the slight feeling of sadness of having to leave Act One of a story - where the setting is so perfectly set up, the world feels real and alive and you could escape right into it, but then the plot has to move forward and the protagonists need an Inciting Incident and Point of No Return, and you're sad that you can't go back to that original place. The Grand Budapest Hotel is another one which really does it for me. I just enjoy living in the set-up.