here are the highlights of what i've read lately. hoping to make this kind of post more of a regular feature.
adam weymouth for the atlantic
"A Yup’ik fisherman who is a sincere believer in his religious role as a steward of nature, believes that he must fulfill his prescribed role to maintain this 'collaborative reciprocity' between hunter and game. Completely barring him from the salmon fishery thwarts the practice of a real religious belief. Under Yup’ik religious belief, this cycle of interplay between humans and animals helped perpetuate the seasons; without the maintaining of that balance, a new year will not follow the old one."
brian levinson for slate
"It's easy to mock Rodger's assertion that he "deserved" a girlfriend. But the only system he understood was one in which good behavior was rewarded, and bad behavior was punished. Do your chores, and you get your allowance. Break a neighbor's window, and you're grounded. When Rodger found himself punished for what he thought was nice-guy behavior, he responded with self-pity, which gradually gave way to anger."
john nicols for the nation
“In the US today, the top 1 percent own about 38 percent of the financial wealth of America. The bottom 60 percent own 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family, is worth over $140 billion; that’s more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. In recent years, we have seen a huge increase in the number of millionaires and billionaires, while we continue to have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. Despite, as many of my Republican friends talk about ‘the oppressive Obama economic policies,’ in the last year Charles and David Koch struggled under these policies and their wealth increased by $12 billion in one year. In terms of income, 95 percent of new income generated in this country in the last year went to the top 1 percent.“
phoebe maltz bovy for the atlantic
"A certain sort of self-deprecating privilege awareness has become, in effect, upper- or upper-middle-class good manners, maybe even a new form of noblesse oblige, reinforcing class divides. When Fortgang’s classmates admonish him to check his privilege, what they’re really doing is socializing him into the culture of the class he’ll enter as a Princeton graduate. Failure to acknowledge privilege is very gauche, maybe even nouveau riche."
jordan ellenburg for the wall street journal
"Since we're only 1 in 10,000 of the U.S. population, that still leaves 99% of scientific advances to be made by all those other kids who didn't get an early ticket to the genius club. We geniuses aren't going to solve all the riddles. Most child prodigies are highly successful—but most highly successful people weren't child prodigies."
other interesting honorable mentions of note:
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