Sometimes it’s hard to realize how much we’re shaped by our own environment, and how we seldom question why we think the way we do - what the hell is water, etc, etc. Using examples from his youth in Yugoslavia, his time at the World Bank, and the moment in history we’re living now, Milanovic tries to explain that ideology is invisble. We assume it to be obvious, and call it “common sense,” brushing it away.
What does it mean to be American? All stories to bind together millions of people as one discrete unit are just that, stories. I’m currently reading Lepore’s These Truths and I’m learning a lot about the history of the early days of the US, and how those early experiences connect to things that are happening today. I very much recommend the book, but if you want a taste this essay is a good starting point, and if you want a taste of a taste, there’s also a really good interview on the EconTalk podcast.
This was a recommendation from my friend Alvaro Videla on the liminal space of our identities, biology, art, etc. This essay pushes the reader to consider the arbitrariness of the categories and taxonomies in which we organize ourselves and the world around us. It’s about ecological thinking, and an argument in favor of nuance over clear cut definitions.
White, Black, Jewish, American, Italian, Costa Rican you pick it… it’s all made up, and that doesn’t mean it’s any less real, or that it doesn’t have an impact in how we live our lives.
In his book, Cosmopolitanism, Appiah uses the analogy of a broken mirror, each shard of which reflects one part of a complex truth from its own particular angle. Most of us think that our little shard of mirror reflects the whole. Appiah then takes the metaphor further - it’s not a single mirror, but instead “lots of mirrors, lots of moral truths.” Similarly, I think his view of our identities is one where we each see ourselves as a bit of a mirror, reflecting back what society tells us about ourselves. Representation matters, if anything, because it allows us to adapt and move our mirrors to new angles.
Everyone wants to belong. What people want is to be wanted, needed. Our social norms and our culture have pushed us to think that we are isolated individuals, but that’s not the case. Describing his time following a platoon of soldiers as a journalist in Afghanistan, and bringing in examples from history, Junger explains one of the most defining conflicts of our postmodern inner lives.
This is one of the wildest and most interesting stories I’ve listened to in a while. While scrolling on social media one day, Latif, one of the producers on Radiolab, discovers that he shares his name with Abdul Latif Nasser, detainee 244 at Guantanamo Bay. Obviously, he wants to know about his namesake, and goes to investigate.
Large events like the Labor Day Carnival and the West Indian American Day Parade in New York bind people together, and give them a way to share their culture and show parts of their identity that are usually hidden day-to-day. This episode covers a few of their stories, as well as the view of the same crowds from the outside.
A strange quality of the education system is that most people don’t really know (nor have a way to know!) what are opportunities that are available for them. It can be a kid who imagines herself only as a doctor, because that’s what her parents do, or a kid who thinks he’d be lucky if he can become a janitor, because its more than his parents ever accomplished, but at any and all levels of the spectrum, this notion of understanding the availability of choices is tough. In this episode of TAL, they talk about the life of young students from low income backgrounds, their shock when learning how the upper class lives, and how that experience changes the course of their lives years later.