Our Selfish Genes – A Theory That Changed The Way We Look At Life

“Genes aren’t what they used to be. In 1976 they were simply stretches of DNA that encoded proteins. We now know about genes made of DNA’s cousin, RNA; we’ve discovered genes that hop from genome to genome, inserting themselves into a new host to be replicated there. And what by far the larger part of the genome is doing for much of the time is still something of a mystery.”

Who Gets To Tell Other People’s Stories? Locating The Line Between Empathy And Exploitation

Anna Holmes: “Here’s how I see it: Empathy is the ability to respect and maybe even understand another’s point of view, revealing larger truths about ourselves and others. Exploitation is the use of another’s experience for personal gain.”
James Parker: “To the degree that you are using a person, a character, simply to propel your plot or give shape to your ideas, to that same degree you are denying this character his or her full reality – and your story will suffer accordingly. Where empathy stops, in other words, exploitation starts.”

You’ll Probably Marry The Wrong Person, So The Best Approach Is Pessimism

Alain de Botton: “This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.”

How Diane Arbus Pulled Herself Out Of Absolute Misery To Become The Photographer We Know

“Diane Arbus was teetering on the edge of a breakdown. In 1956, she tearfully dissolved the decade-long fashion-photography enterprise that she had been conducting successfully but stressfully with her husband, Allan. Her misery was longstanding. Fashion photography is built on artifice. Diane needed, temperamentally and philosophically, to poke through pretensions and masks to expose the hidden truth.”