The News
Baby talk
Having kids sucks, the journalist Rebecca Reid says: “I have less time, less money, less freedom, dramatically less sleep — less of everything I built my life in value of.” And yet, somehow, it has made her happier, and, unexpectedly, more productive, because she is busy. “I have a perpetual motion throughout the day,” she writes. “In making my life dramatically harder, I’ve also made it somehow easier.”
“There is something liberating about being unliberated,” she says, “about being forced to think about something or someone else before yourself.” Before, she could get lost in “self-care” — “don’t worry about showering! Don’t worry about getting out of bed! It’s okay to eat takeaway in your pyjamas” — and struggled with her mental health. Now she has no time to overthink. “I hear people say [parenthood] is worth it ‘for your kids,’” she says. “But it’s not that… It’s not like she’s the free gift that justifies the purchase.” Instead, it has made her own life better, by “ruining the lovely, comfortable, luxurious life and replacing [it] with boundaries and expectations.”
I wish I could, but I don’t want to
George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, “hated, with a real passion, going out to lunch and dinner,” notes Shaun Usher. He hated the formality of it, the possibility of being forced to converse with a bunch of people he didn’t like, and — being a vegetarian — the inevitability of being served meat. “Over the years, he became a master of the pointed decline,” says Usher, “and rarely disguised his contempt for the absurdities of social etiquette.” Usher found a new example recently, and shared it on Letters of Note: Shaw’s response to Lady Randolph Churchill, daughter-in-law of the former British prime minister, when she accused him of bad manners after he declined her lunch invitation.
“If I make the usual excuses, and convince her that I am desolated by some other engagement, she will ask me again,” Shaw wrote. “And when I have excused myself six times running, she will conclude that I personally dislike her… Therefore I am compelled to do the simple thing, and when you say, ‘Come to lunch with a lot of people,’ reply flatly, ‘I won’t.’ If you propose anything pleasant to me, I shall reply with equal flatness, ‘I will.’ But lunching with a lot of people — carnivorous people — is not pleasant.”
Mood music
You can learn a lot about whether to pay attention to someone’s arguments by the mood they express them in, says the economist Bryan Caplan. Sometimes, that’s in a basic way: “When someone expresses his views with a calm mood, you consider him more reliable than when he expresses his views with an hysterical mood.” But Caplan thinks you can be more granular than that: Some arguments should be expressed in a certain mood, and if they are not, it should undermine your confidence in the arguer.
For instance, a reasonable mood for a foreign policy hawk “is sorrow… We are in a tragic situation [and] we have to kill many thousands of innocent civilians in order to avoid even greater evils.” But often hawks express themselves with “anger and machismo,” such as US Senator Ted Cruz’s “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” Similarly, someone keen to restrict immigration should be in “anguish that a tremendous opportunity to enrich mankind… must go to waste,” and full of pity for the billions condemned to poverty for being born in the wrong place. “Instead, the standard restrictionist moods are anger and xenophobia.” “This doesn’t mean their view is false,” he says, “but it is a strong reason to think it’s false.”