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Jo Toon

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https://desimplify.substack.com
https://www.goodreads.com/jotoon

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“Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad? But art did cause damage, and I was affected by films I had seen when I was young, and I was ashamed when I watched an old film and saw racist depictions I hadn’t seen before, and I was glad to be ashamed. But did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?”
Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

Amanda Montell
“That’s because language doesn’t work to manipulate people into believing things they don’t want to believe; instead, it gives them license to believe ideas they’re already open to. Language—both literal and figurative, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, politically correct and politically incorrect—reshapes a person’s reality only if they are in an ideological place where that reshaping is welcome.”
Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism—Understanding the Social Science of Cult Influence

Jonathan Franzen
“He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.”
Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

Philip Roth
“No, if you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is.”
Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Jonathan Franzen
“The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.”
Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

year in books
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Sadie
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Aravind...
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The Republic by PlatoCritique of Pure Reason by Immanuel KantDiscourse on Method by René DescartesMetaphysics by AristotleThe Philosophy of History by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Most Influential Philosophy Books
23 books — 17 voters
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar WildeUlysses by James JoyceGulliver’s Travels by Jonathan SwiftA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Best Irish Literature
634 books — 723 voters

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