Sublime

Both his admirers and his rivals agreed that he was his generation’s most singular man. But, paradoxically, his uniqueness was almost a norm for many members of his generation. As Jews, they were anomalous in their non-Jewish surroundings; as Zionists, they were anomalous among Jews; as Israelis, they were anomalous in their Arab surroundings; as s

In their day jobs, his parents continually wrestled with the tension, in American law, between individual freedoms and the collective good. Both identified, broadly speaking, as utilitarians: any law should seek not to maximize some abstract notion of freedom but rather the greatest good for the greatest number. They never pushed their views on Sam

Bill is the person to whom everyone turns when they need something. The word “no” just isn’t in his vocabulary. He fixes cars for women at his church. He coaches his son’s little league baseball team. His buddies call on him when they need help moving. He looks after his widowed mother every evening after work.

People are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.

A biographer of the novelist E. M. Forster wrote, “To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to be that guy.

(A major issue that conservatives even today have yet to solve is how, in opposing the reductions of the immanent frame, they can avoid the perception of being against justice and mercy and can support all humans flourishing.)

And yet somehow Sam had committed his life to maximizing happiness on earth without feeling any of his own. Between the summer of 2014, when he started at Jane Street, and the summer of 2017, he’d taken no vacation. He’d actually worked ten days when US markets were closed—the action in foreign markets was especially great when US traders weren’t p