Samantha Basalari

“When workers are asked, in interviews, what they think of the students, they invariably refer to them as "our future bosses," and say they hope this experience will make better chefs of them than their fathers have been. French Revolution all for nothing?”
― Mavis Gallant, Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews

“coffee helped disperse Europe’s alcoholic fog, fostering a heightened alertness and attention to detail, and, as employers soon discovered, dramatically improving productivity.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“This is precisely the anxiety that Weber writes about in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Protestantism, he argued, introduced into Western culture a new, obsessive doubt about the status of one’s salvation. Those who cannot know whether or not they are chosen will do everything in their power to act as though they are, if only to ease their mind. They will go above and beyond what is required, in fact, because no assurance will ever convince them that their efforts have paid off. This doubt spurred a remarkable energy—the “Protestant work ethic,” a spirit of industriousness and self-regulation that created the necessary conditions for the rise of capitalism.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Privacy was a modern fixation, I said, and distinctly American. For most of human history we accepted that our lives were being watched, listened to, supervened upon by gods and spirits—not all of them benign, either.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning