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A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
Writing in the 1990s, the political economist Albert Hirschman gave a label to ‘accept your lot’ defences of the status quo: he called it the ‘futility thesis,’ the fatalistic certainty that new policies inevitably make matters worse over all, so better not to change things at all.
The Unknowers
Linsey McGoey
The first literary book in Albanian was published in the sixteenth century, and it was a translation of the Bible. The country was then Catholic.
The Art of Fiction No. 153
The Paris Review
The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood—only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque—what we do to one another so grotesque—that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar el Akkad
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