“It is in the nature of intellectual life—and part of its value—to gravitate toward the extreme alternative position, since that is usually the one most in need of articulation. Harvard and Yale pay some of their professors to tell the students that everything they believe is a bourgeois illusion, as the Koch brothers pay their foundation staff to say that all bourgeois illusions are real, and the fact that neither is entirely true does not alter the need to pay people to say it. The ideas we pay for, as Ayn Rand grasped when she looked at her royalty statements, are those which define the outer edge. We want big minds to voice extreme ideas, since our smaller minds already voice the saner ones.” ~Adam Gopnik #rereading

(I also read or read about Camus when I get stressed out). Facing History https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/09/facing-history