“My dad has always had a southern accent: His words fall out of his mouth the way molasses would sound if it could speak, thick and slow.” – Annie Joy Williams, The Atlantic
“And there was almost no human being so unlike other human beings that it did not know what a kiss was.” – Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
“To do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about; by and large, they must also accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, left-wing politicians struggle to find issues on which they can be authentically populist. Many of the problems that they hope to resolve, such as climate change, housing scarcity, and surging health-care costs, are complicated. This means that the policies needed to fix them are also complicated, and cannot be explained without ascending to the realm of abstraction. Slogans that resonate with the public seldom translate literally into successful policy.” – Joseph Heath, The Atlantic
“I’ve become invisible at 67. Waitstaff look through me. Colleagues talk over me. Shop assistants forget I exist. At first it stung. Then I discovered its strange power. I notice everything. I speak rarely. When I finally do, the surprise ensures everyone listens. Aging isn’t decline. It’s stealth mode.” – The Old Grey Thinker
“If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?” – Roger Ailes quoted in Letters from an American
“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity. It is an act of justice.” Nelson Mandela
“Lower-income households are under stress, there’s no question about that,” Adler said. “Lower-income Americans are definitely feeling the pinch in rent, and it is showing up in collections issues in many places.” – Jeff Adler, VP of Yardi Matrix, Multifamily Dive
“One reason we don’t build enough affordable housing is we’ve made affordable housing unaffordable to build.” – Ezra Klein, New York Times
“The treasury is not getting rid of pennies—they’re not making more, but you can spend the ones you’ve got. There are 300 billion in circulation, although “in circulation” is not quite the right phrase, because roughly 299 billion are stashed away in old coffee cans or ashtrays.” – Tommy Tomlinson, The Writing Shed
“It allows me to trick myself and escape, for a moment, back to a time when things were no less complicated or hard but sure felt like they were.” – Jeremy Markovich, The North Carolina Rabbit Hole
“When I lost him, someone told me that Hammy had left a part of himself with me, and taken a piece of me with him, and it sure feels that way. I think about that often.” – Melanie D.G. Kaplan in an interview with Tommy Tomlinson, The Writing Shed
“Have kids. It’s the best thing you’ll ever do to ruin your life.” – Scott Galloway, Overtime with Bill Maher