Quote of the week
Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.
The New York Times
On the family
Think of that entity “the family,” an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other: a surname, a sexual dyad, a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage, a circuit of blood relationships, a system of companionship and succor, a building, a proscenium between “private” and “public”, an economic unit of earning and taxation, the prime site of economic consumption, the prime site of cultural consumption, a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children, a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations, a daily routine, a unit in a community of worship, a site of patriotic formation, and of course the list could go on.
