“It’s often said that genealogical research is the second most popular hobby in the United States, after gardening, and the second most popular search category online, after porn,” Maya Jasanoff writes, in an engrossing and sharp-eyed dive from this week’s issue into our collective fascination with ancestry.
(Via The New Yorker newsletter)
Offered without comment.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi; Author: Nozaki Bunzō; Publisher: Kakumotoya Kinjirō
Duncan Trussel put it fantastically when he said that “anger is the second wound inflicted by your enemy”. Something he puts down to Buddha, but unfortunately, I can’t find any reference for it currently. Whoever said it, it is dead on. The only outcome is an wound on the person suffering with it, burnt by its toxic effects.
Anger does not bring back my work. In any situation, it doesn’t change whatever has happened, it just affects the future negatively.
Indeed (above emphasis mine).
It’s very close, that quote, to a line in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, XI:
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the cause of it.
Managing my anger is something I constantly work on. Some days I’m better at it than others. I find the variation more to do with me than the thing that angers me, which says something about me.
There are banks you can’t trust to hold your money for you and places where you can’t trust the rule of law to regulate them. There are governments you can’t trust not to seize your money from the banks, or falsify election results, or change the property registry and take your house. There are social media companies you can’t trust not to freeze your account arbitrarily. Most people in the US, most days, live in a high-trust world, where it’s easy and reasonable to trust that the intermediaries who run the databases that shape our lives will behave properly. But not everyone everywhere lives like that.
Amen
