I told Agnes that once, when asked to share an inspiring quote for a friend’s wedding, I picked one from Rainer Maria Rilke: “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” In hindsight, my choice seemed silly, and I guessed she would agree. “Yeah, it feels like a way of reassuring yourself that some of the flaws in the relationship are actually really beautiful,” she said, adding that this is “why Socrates thought the poets didn’t know what they were talking about.” The ineffable wisdom they wrote of—inaccessible to others, because it was so mysterious and private—sounded to Socrates a lot like ignorance, she said. The idea that a marriage should hold space for each person’s incommunicable core, she believed, “comes from this pessimism where it’s, like, Look, at the end of the day we know we can’t really help one another, so the best thing we can do is not interfere too much.”

His greatest insight, Agnes believes, was that people are intellectually lonely—they live under an illusion of self-sufficiency. Dialogue was the only way out of their natural state.

We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves

As she saw it, thinking is not something that one person can do alone. It takes two people to have a thought.

I had noticed, among my friends, that some of the most successful marriages involved inequality, and clarity about it: one person sacrificed more than the other, and it was O.K.

Arnold Brooks, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, came to Agnes Callard’s office hours every week to talk about Aristotle.

But they also made large transfers of advanced weaponry and military know-how to Ukraine. As a result, over time, a failed state defended by a ramshackle collection of oligarch-sponsored militias turned into the third-largest army in Europe—right behind Turkey and Russia—with a quarter million men under arms. 

That was the point when Russia invaded Crimea.

According to a speech made at the time by a State Department official, the U.S. had by that time spent $5 billion to influence Ukraine’s politics.

The previous year, Ukrainian diplomats had negotiated a free trade deal with the European Union that would have cut out Russia.

until quite recently, having Ukraine in NATO was a prospect that struck even many American foreign policy thinkers as a bad idea.

There are reasons why the U.S. might want to project power into the Black Sea region.

Ainsi Françoise et ma tante appréciaient-elles ensemble au cours de cette séance matinale, les premiers événements du jour. Mais quelquefois ces événements revêtaient un caractère si mystérieux et si grave que ma tante sentait qu’elle ne pourrait pas attendre le moment où Françoise monterait, et quatre coups de sonnette formidables retentissaient dans la maison.

le reste de la tour carrée et à demi détruite

On reconnaissait le clocher de Saint-Hilaire de bien loin

Mais si les acteurs me préoccupaient ainsi,

Françoise, en effet, qui était depuis des années à son service

Maman s’assit à côté de mon lit ; elle avait pris François le Champi

L’angoisse que je venais d’éprouver,

Mais le seul d’entre nous pour qui la venue de Swann devint l’objet d’une préoccupation douloureuse, ce fut moi

Ma seule consolation, quand je montais me coucher, était que maman viendrait m’embrasser quand je serais dans mon lit.

I

The refusal to cry out in pain seems grounded in an entrenched anxiety related to Scarry's axiom: What if all pain is an act, even our own?

In her 1985 book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry makes a profound assertion: “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.”

There are some cheaper eye tracking solutions available for the desktop

Remarkably, no African state would be conquered by Europeans until the 19th century

polities such as Benin, Kongo and Mali that featured thriving urban centers, exquisite artisanship and legal and administrative systems on a par with much of medieval Europe. Early on, Portugal discovered the folly of sending soldiers charging up beaches in plate armor and changed tack to making alliances, transacting with informed and eloquent African leaders largely as equals and outsourcing the deadly business of capturing humans for enslavement.

French proposes this royal spectacular as the motive force in the creation of the Western world. The prospect of directly tapping African gold by skirting the traders of Islamic North Africa was certainly high on Henry the Navigator’s list. Yet by the time gold was found in quantity (in 1471, the year French takes as the starting date of Africa’s entry into modernity, with the Portuguese fort at Elmina in modern-day Ghana as its key locus), Henry was long dead. Instead, it was slaving that saved his skin, and slaves would soon outstrip gold as the most valuable commodity in Europe’s expanding Atlantic sphere.

lynched just by looking

This was always a worry about the American experiment in capitalist liberal democracy. The pace of change, the ethos of individualism, the relentless dehumanization that capitalism abets, the constant moving and disruption, combined with a relatively small government and the absence of official religion, risked the construction of an overly atomized society, where everyone has to create his or her own meaning, and everyone feels alone. The American project always left an empty center of collective meaning, but for a long time Americans filled it with their own extraordinary work ethic, an unprecedented web of associations and clubs and communal or ethnic ties far surpassing Europe’s, and such a plethora of religious options that almost no one was left without a purpose or some kind of easily available meaning to their lives. Tocqueville marveled at this American exceptionalism as the key to democratic success, but he worried that it might not endure forever.

She needed those relationships. But she also relied on filmed verification of her impact on others. The reciprocal gaze that marks her early photographs would be furthered and intensified in the collaborative form of portraiture in her mature work

And if they fail in Indiana or Cleveland, as they likely will, they need, quite simply, to disown their party’s candidate. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.

Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why.

Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews

Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville centuries before him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its worst (say, 2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but the future seems not so much better (say, 2016).

Hence many Democrats’ frustration with him. Those who saw in his campaign the seeds of revolutionary change, who were drawn to him by their own messianic delusions, came to be bitterly disappointed by his governing moderation and pragmatism.

In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before.

But it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue.

And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.