Sublime

Humans must be the only animals who build zoos for themselves.

The Corrective Lens

more than a dog of his size and stature could have hoped for: food, a den with humans he could manipulate or evade, and an outside world that was not threatening.

Every day, I track the digital trails that people leave as they make their way across the web. From the buttons or keys we click or tap, I try to understand what we really want, what we will really do, and who we really are.

The cat is responsive to success and failure in her pursuits, but whether the norms that govern her pursuits are valid—whether she ought to behave like a cat or a husky—is not at issue for her. For human beings, by contrast, the validity of norms is always implicitly and potentially explicitly at issue. We act in light of a normative understanding

Expertise plays a crucial role in a judge’s ability to figure out what someone is like. When I look through a woman’s apartment and find a tube of lipstick, I see a tube of lipstick. Many women looking at the same evidence would see a tube of MAC lipstick, or Cover-girl lipstick, or . . .

As I stand in line waiting to pay for the groceries, I could be mistaken for just another farmer or housewife or retired teacher. For years, I taught myself not to stand out, not to draw attention, and now it comes effortlessly, which is both sad and also a relief.

One of my favourite blurb descriptions of a character is of Count Fosco in The Woman in White: ‘who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison’. No need for a ‘sinister’ at all there. Another is on Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which tells us that a young woman in a boarding house ‘pecks at spam and mashed potato by night’,