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January 13, 2018

From The New York Times (Niall Ferguson on "Which fiction and nonfiction writers — playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — inspired you most early in your career? And which writers working today do you most admire?"):
I’d have to begin with A. J. P. Taylor, who was the first historian I ever read and who inspired me to believe a) that historical writing should never be dull, but should bristle with irony and paradox, and b) that historical knowledge is a prerequisite for worthwhile commentary on contemporary matters. Another major influence at the early stage was Norman Stone. But it wasn’t just historians who inspired me as I was starting out. As a sixth-former (high school senior), I lapped up Tom Stoppard’s plays, painted a mural inspired by the poetry of Thom Gunn and read compulsively the reviews of punk bands in the New Musical Express. At Oxford, I came under the influence of The Spectator, then edited by Charles Moore, one of the most gifted English journalists of his generation and now Margaret Thatcher’s biographer. But my favorite writer at that time was Flann O’Brien, the great Irish humorist. I have always liked his description of himself as “a spoilt Proust.” No one writing in English today is remotely as funny as O’Brien. Only the French can still produce real men of letters. Chapeau, therefore, to Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq.

From The Economist:
Daniel Carlson, a sociologist at the University of Utah, has shown that couples (whether married or cohabiting) who share child care and housework duties more equally report greater satisfaction in their relationships and in their sex lives. In the 1980s and 1990s the opposite was true. Men and women used to be content to specialise—he paying the mortgage, she changing the nappies. No longer.

From The Economist:
For those who achieve it, marriage increasingly looks like a triumph. More than in the past, it is a fulfilling union between two people who collaborate (if still rather unequally) in child care, housework and money-earning. Almost all couples now live together before they marry, so people are well aware of what their partners expect of them. Most will have several more years to fine-tune their behaviour before the arrival of children.

From Harper's:
Humans’ judgments of others on the basis of natural body odor do not consistently align with judgments deriving from adulterated, “diplomatic” body odor.

From The New York Times:
If you have 60 years of radical individualism and ruthless meritocracy, you’re going to end up with a society that is atomized, distrustful and divided.
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