Maybe there are two types of people in the world: those who favour humans over ideology, and those who favour ideology over humans. I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winn...
Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse.
It is slightly chilling to realize there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture, and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to...
In a crowd we are microbes infecting everyone around us, a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will. We are impulsive, irritable, irrational:
In 1996 Hubacek had been driving drunk at 100 mph with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 1...
I, personally, no longer take part in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they’ve committed a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I probably should. I m...
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
I understood why parents would want to do that, but it wasn’t the message I was going for. If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming. Justine’s crime h...
I learned, the field of interest was a man from Wales who could recognize all his sheep as individuals but couldn’t recognize human faces, not even his wife, not even himself in the mirror.
I just want you to know that it makes me feel like shit to do this. And Jonah paused, Michael told me. And then he said to me, no joke, he said, ‘You know, I really don’t care how you feel.’ Michael s...
But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don’t?
As a group they tend to be more charming than most people, she said. They have no warm emotions of their own but will study the rest of us.
And of course the misuse of privilege is a much better thing to get people for than the things we used to get people for, like having children out of wedlock. But a great number of people who hadn’t j...
And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things. He
Among the Parisians there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contes...
Alex is basically the most irresponsible man I have ever met. He uses his powers to inflame paranoia. He boldly makes stuff up to suit his weird agenda. Alex eschews facts and reason and he definitely...
Al was referring to the time during the Cuban missile crisis that he left his five-months-pregnant wife home alone with no food or access to money and in desperation she had to call her mother and sis...
A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we’ve created a stag...
A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.
Shameworthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world