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Remember Bernard Williams and his criticism of utilitarianism? He said that it denies us our integrity—our sense of being a whole and undivided person—and sacrifices our individual core projects in the name of a nonspecific mass human “happiness.” Utilitarianism can sometimes deny us the things that make us “us.” Williams would find absurd the idea that I did something morally wrong by buying my son a present celebrating a moment that we lovingly shared, and which represents an integral bonding experience. Ultimately, that’s where I personally land too—aligned with Williams and Susan Wolf, who warned us against seeking moral sainthood. Our lives are our own, and we shouldn’t feel bad about filling them with experiences and even objects that give those lives shape and dimension.
How to Be Perfect
Michael Schur
When the Trump administration came to power, the chairman of the PCAOB, James Doty, was in the middle of trying to negotiate a new arrangement with Beijing. But Doty was removed in 2018 by Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Jay Clayton, who was chosen by Mnuchin. Clayton was also a legal adviser to Alibaba. As he had so many times before, Trump’s pro-business Treasury secretary had effectively short-circuited America’s response to China’s economic aggression. The massive fraud and corruption these practices allowed eventually became well known enough that a cottage industry of short sellers cropped up. By simply performing basic research on these companies, firms like Muddy Waters Research were able to expose fraud after fraud. They were featured in a 2018 documentary called The China Hustle, which chronicled the efforts of Wall Street whistleblowers to call attention to the huge scope and scale of the probtem. But as so often happened, when China’s economic aggression was exposed, it simply changed its tactics.
Chaos Under Heaven
Josh Rogin
It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world—billiard balls are most often used for illustration—they don't actually strike each other. “Rather,” as Timothy Ferris explains, “the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other . . . were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.” When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter),
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
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