Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Freediving was a precaution against accidents like this and an essential skill when interacting with whales. Whales, especially calves, get excited during human-whale encounters and can sometimes charge and smother divers. Being able to dive down to forty feet and stay there for a minute or so until a whale passes could mean the difference between a life-changing and a life-ending experience. The fact is that nobody—not Prinsloo, Schnöller, or Buyle—really knows how risky these kinds of encounters are. Up until ten years ago, Schnöller told me earlier, nobody was diving with whales.
The public reaction to this controversy had a broader political significance for Democrats. It was further confirmation—conclusive to me—that blaming the disaffection of white working- and middle-class males on social issues was a bad mistake, intellectually and politically. How could our problem with these voters be our disrespect for traditional sexual morality and our flouting of conservative religious principles if the Republicans lost support when they tried to impeach a president who had oral sex outside his marriage, lost even more support when they sternly insisted that life should end only by God’s unaided will, and, in 2006, lost their House majority despite making Democrats vote—as we overwhelmingly did—against banning same-sex marriages? The noneconomic explanation for our weakness with these voters was not totally invalidated, but only one-third of the alliterative trilogy could still be assigned a share of the blame. Guns remained an obstacle for us, but God and gays were off the hook. I became even more convinced that “It’s the economy, stupid” was the best guide to what we should be advocating and to winning back the support of white men. It was time to stop seeing white working-class males’ legitimate unhappiness about economic trends as a manifestation of excessive religiosity, a gun fetish, or homophobia.
In the approximately two years in which I compulsively consumed romance novels, I eventually reached a place where I could not find a book I enjoyed. It was as if I had burned out my novel-reading pleasure center, and no book could revive it. The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind. Reading had always been my primary source of pleasure and escape, so it was a shock and a grief when it stopped working. Even then it was hard to abandon.
Dopamine Nation
Anna Lembke
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise