To illustrate the point further, if Joel Stein had just replaced Indians with African-American in his piece, ruing over the fact that his white neighborhood had been taken over by Blacks, then Time would never ever, not in a thousand years, let that get to print.

—

This is why Joel Stein’s piece was undeniably racist.

My Own Private Bigotry | Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind

(via Instapaper)

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution, like so much of what once impressed us: the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the feelings after finishing Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.

— On Distraction by Alain de Botton, City Journal Spring 2010 (via Instapaper)