 Agree to disagree The word “argument” has two distinct but easily confused meanings. One is debate, disagreement, dialogue; the other is a screaming match. One is productive — you can learn, persuade, further one another’s knowledge and understanding — and the other is, usually, not. On his Substack Ranging Widely, the writer David Epstein interviews Amanda Ripley, a journalist who has written a book about how you can stop the one descending into the other. There are simple conversational techniques, Ripley says, which can help avoid the worst. A good one: She found herself at a dinner when someone said something she profoundly disagreed with, and “I literally said: ’Oh, wow! That’s so interesting, because I feel the exact opposite way.’ And if you can say it in that tone of genuine delight and curiosity, while acknowledging straight-up that you totally disagree, it’s like this portal opens up. You’ve reframed disagreement to be something really intriguing and compelling and safe. It’s almost the same tone you would use to say: ‘Oh my God, I went to that same high school!’” Fertile ground The public discourse about the ongoing, global collapse in fertility rates is “seriously weird,” the social scientist Alice Evans notes. That is, she thinks, because parts of the conservative movement want to use the fact of declining fertility as a reason to return to the patriarchal gender roles they prefer, and because parts of the progressive movement don’t want to admit it’s happening because they think it would give ammunition to the aforementioned conservatives. But it is happening, with “major implications for economic growth and social stability,” Evans writes on The Great Gender Divergence. Efforts, especially in the hardest-hit countries in East Asia, to boost reproduction have been a “total flop.” She argues that trying to get people to have more children “puts the cart before the horse” — the problem is upstream; more and more people are remaining single, perhaps because people can afford to be choosy and because the stigma around singledom has declined. As a result, “relationship formation increasingly depends on love,” she says, “yet compatibility can prove elusive. Men and women who are shy, introverted, boring, aggressive, violent, manipulative, deceitful, unfaithful, or ideologically polarised may ultimately call it quits.” Rich pickings Every subculture has its own ways of establishing status and pecking orders. That’s true among the ultra-rich, of course. The Gen-Z chronicler Steph, who writes all in lowercase for some reason, says that when she began hanging around with the very wealthy, “my new, well-off peers didn’t flaunt their wealth with designer logos or private jet selfies,” but instead “dropped subtle signals during dinner-table debates about which aman resort has the best amenities or whether soho house was becoming too plebeian.” But navigating that is a minefield for anyone — what if they order the wrong kind of dessert at Casa Cipriani? — so, luckily, help is at hand. There is “an entire ecosystem of rich kid meme pages” that, on the surface, mocks the trust fund tourists, satirizing archetypes like “the miu miu-adorned social climber and the ‘struggling’ bushwick artist,” but subtly also tells other rich kids how they should behave. The meme-sharing also lets people brag about their wealth without showing off their Rolexes: “you can repost an ironic ‘rich guys in ibiza be like’ meme, and signal to the world that you do, in fact, know what rich guys in ibiza be like.” |
