"Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays ... but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned."
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in
Sometimes it pays to accept and celebrate what we get. And sometimes, we only get something because we settled for it. It helps to be able to discern the difference between the two.
“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her classic Arts of the Possible while the field of counterfactuals was emerging in
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the