Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Good question, good answer. "If by contract you mean 'a contract as typically defined at law', which is to say a contract that has most of the legal consequences that a typical contract has, then the answer is: Largely not"
Son's plea to let his mother go. "By promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death, we have created a new biological status held by an ever-growing part of the nation, a no-exit state nearly as remote from life as death"
Notes from a same-sex wedding, three days after Obama's intervention. "A cultural barrier has been crossed, a taboo forever retired. Gays have not claimed marriage; it has claimed us. We are a sideshow, an outlier, no longer"
"The joining of husband and wife yields a more productive firm, because it allows one spouse to specialise in earning income from working in the market, while the other specialises in the domestic sphere." But times change
In America, eccentrics are not born, but made. Usually by ingesting large quantities of illegal drugs. "When I landed in the People’s Republic of Berkeley in 1970 it felt as though I had followed Alice down the rabbit hole"
"With his switch from ambivalence to advocacy, Obama is sending a signal to the courts that the country is ready for gay marriage, giving them cover to uphold it. Courts like to stay within the mainstream. Obama has just moved it"
"Too many obesity experts don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat. Many black women are fat because we want to be. It’s not only aesthetics that make black fat different. It’s politics too"
Former Anglican bishop discusses marriage. "Since the arrival of no-fault divorce without consent, is marriage even a contract any longer? What kind of contract is marriage if you can get out of it more easily than your mortgage?"
HBO’s "Girls" offers Angier an excuse to look at science of female friendships. Whether for elephants, mice or monkeys strong relationships between females are the glue that holds groups together. And yes, three is the magic number
Challenging recent arguments that we are getting lonelier, and that social media is making this worse. "Americans have either been getting lonelier since time immemorial or worrying about it since then. The latter is more likely"
On being the "hairy godmother". Experiment in not shaving for 18 months, female persuasion. "I smell just the same as I did before. Which is a bit like soap after showering, and a bit like Christmas cake first thing in the morning"
Super essay on how Facebook is affecting everday life. "It's not just a technological marvel, a youth movement or a business story. After just eight years of existence, Facebook is the biggest social phenomenon since the telephone"
Image by born1945 on Flickr
Adam Gopnik, on Nicolas Sarkozy
"People will forgive a short man with a beautiful wife if he seems sufficiently surprised; Sarkozy seemed merely showy"
