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System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence–and it is not designed to know the size of its jumps…

For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs.

We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit.

It isn’t…When the government cuts public services that we all pay for with our taxes, demand for those services doesn’t suddenly cease. The work is simply transferred onto women…

Yet for many people, the Internet’s structure was–indeed remains–deeply counterintuitive.

This is because it defies every expectation one has developed from experience of other media industries, which are all predicated on control of the customer…the Internet abdicates control to the individual; that is its special allure, its power to be endlessly surprising, as well as its founding principle.

I hope, rather, that the book generates respect for these men and women, for those who have done something for their families that many of us could hardly find the strength to do.

Respect for this drive that migrants have, a drive which is stronger than the criminal cartels, a drive more powerful than the train engine and a drive more vital than any limb–a leg, for example–of our very body.

The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well. As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery…we’re terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers.

The point of memory techniques is…to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.

When social infrastructure, [the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact], is robust, it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbors; when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves…local, face-to-face interactions…are the building blocks of all public life.

Thus, questions about inequality in the modern world can be reformulated as follows.

Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why aren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?

A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from a clamshell: It was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequities of religious, conservative, social practice…The impulse toward liberation isn’t inoculated against by strict conservative backgrounds; it’s often inculcated by them.

It turned out that the introverts who were especially good at acting like extroverts tended to score high for a trait that psychologists call “self-monitoring.” Self-monitors are highly skilled at modifying their behavior to the social demands of a situation.”

We found out later that in January 2015, state officials, while telling Flint residents that their water was safe to drink, were arranging for water coolers to be delivered to the Flint State Office Building so state employees wouldn’t have to drink from the tap.

What exactly was a witch?…A witch is one who can do or seems to do strange things, beyond the known power of art and ordinary nature, by virtue of a confederacy with evil spirits.

When privileged children work incredibly hard in school, it’s easy to forget the ways in which private music lessons, expensive tutors, and a privileged community also enable their achievements…American meritocracy is built on exclusion.

In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack–good jobs, a strong safety net, role models–we have neglected the critical ways that exploitation contributes to the persistence of poverty. We have overlooked a fact that landlords never have: there is a lot of money to be made off the poor…Exploitation thrives when it comes to the essentials, like housing and food.

In contrast to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a ‘societal purpose,’ but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities.

Keys’ primary argument to his military patrons was that solving the hunger problem effectively would be good for democracy. A famished Europe would be fertile ground for communist and fascist ideologues. Knowledge about hunger could be a weapon used to fend off the Red Menace.

Obama administration officials touted statistics that distorted what was really happening on the ground. The Bush administration had done the same, but Obama staffers in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false.

Some defined homeowners’ rights as an extension of their constitutional right to freedom of assembly. They had a right to choose their associates. That right would be infringed if their neighborhoods were racially mixed.

For they remind us that there must have been countless social customs of signs and symbols once alive in the Middle Ages, entire sophisticated gestural dialects that have since completely vanished.

No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record, and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good indicator. Ocean acidification played a role in at least two of the Big Five extinctions (the end-Permian and the end-Triassic) and quite possibly it was a major factor in a third (the end-Cretaceous).

There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided…In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog…The grifter class depends on these two positions getting confused.