Iceland II, 2024, Oil On Canvas, 90 X 120 Cm

untitled by coquinete on Flickr.

untitled by vamitos on Flickr.

Time doesn’t feel the same anymore.

untitled by 23pavasariai on Flickr.

Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he’d never heard a patient of color talk of needing “closure.” They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure. The problem with closure is that once you have a taste of it, you want it in every little aspect of your life. Especially when you’re bleeding to death, and your slave, who is in full rebellion, is screaming,... you attempt to stanch the bleeding with a waterlogged copy of Vibe magazine someone has left in the gutter. Kanye West has announced, “I am rap!” Jay-Z thinks he’s Picasso. And life is fucking fleeting.

Paul Beaty The Sellout

They failed, because as the blogger Epicurean Dealmaker pointed out on Twitter, “Markets distill the biases, opinions, & convictions of elites,” which makes them “Structurally less able to predict populist movements.” The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment was in full display on social media last night. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. A lot of my professional colleagues seemed to, and the dominant tone framed this as a blow against the enlightened “us” and the beautiful world we are building, struck by a plague of morlocks who had crawled out of their hellish subterranean world to attack our impending utopia. Surrendering traditional powers and liberties to a distant state is a lot easier if you think of that state as run by “people like me,” not “strangers from another place,” and particularly if that surrender is done in the name of empowering “people who are like me” in our collective dealings with other, farther “strangers who aren’t.” These sorts of tribal affiliations cause problems, obviously, which is why elites were so eager to tamp them down. Unfortunately, they are also what glues polities together, and makes people willing to sacrifice for them.  Elites missed this because they're the exception -- the one group that has a transnational identity.

Megan McArdle “'Citizens of the World'? Nice Thought, But ...”

Albert Bierstadt

I had no first love. I began with the second.

Ivan Turgenev, First Love

Madonna Kolhbenschlag, in Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye, however, pleased me very much when she explained that in the original version of the Frog Prince story, the frog was transformed not by a kiss but only when the princess acknowledged her disgust, picked him up, and threw him in the fire. I have seen more men changed, I think, when their wives stopped putting up with their chauvinism than through their acceptance of it. I have seen children change when their parents thought enough of them to demand that they act in keeping with their inner wisdom, or at least common sense. I think love, wise love, sometimes demands a transformative toss into the fire, rather than the reinforcement of beastliness or froggishness in people.

Carol S. Pearson

https://xkcd.com/1704/