Many last names in America are “occupational”—they reflect the professions of our ancestors. “Fletchers” made arrows, “Coopers” made barrels, “Sawyers” cut wood, and so on. Sometimes the alignment of one’s last name and one’s career is purely coincidental—see, for instance, poker champion Chris Moneymaker, world record-holding sprinter Usain Bolt, and the British neurology duo, who sometimes published together, of Russell Brain and Henry Head. Such serendipitous surnames are called “aptronyms,” a favorite word of mine.

Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive (2011)

If a finite game is to be won by someone it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won.

We know that someone has won the game when all the players have agreed who among them is the winner. No other condition than the agreement of the players is absolutely required in determining who has won the game.

It may appear that the approval of the spectators, or the referees, is also required in the determination of the winner. However, it is simply the case that if the players do not agree on a winner, the game has not come to a decisive conclusion—and the players have not satisfied the original purpose of playing. Even if they are carried from the field and forcibly blocked from further play, they will not consider the game ended.

Suppose the players all agree, but the spectators and the referees do not. Unless the players can be persuaded that their agreement was mistaken, they will not resume the play—indeed, they cannot resume the play. We cannot imagine players returning to the field and truly playing if they are convinced the game is over.

James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (1986)

Lord Acton wasn’t quite right; it doesn’t take absolute power to corrupt absolutely. Some people can arrive at the state of absolute corruption with a good deal less than absolute power.

Joseph Epstein, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (2011)

As we grow up, we aim to be “self-possessed,” not taken over by others. But as the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett says, “People have no chance to grow up. A lifetime is not long enough.”

Hilary Mantel, “The Princess Myth,” A Memoir of My Former Self (2023)

The word “promiscuous,” in the sense of nonselective sexual intercourse, is pejorative in English and generally is applied to women; this also is true of the equivalent word in the Trobriand Islands (Malinowski 1929), Western Arnhem Land (Berndt and Berndt 1951), and highland New Guinea (Berndt 1962). Similarly, Marshall (1971) writes of Mangaia: “Traditionally, a male goes from female to female—leaving one for another when he tires of the first or hears that she has gone with another man. People admire the boy who has had many girls, comparing him to ’a strong man, like a bull, going from woman to woman.’ … But they do not admire the girl who has many boys, comparing her to a pig.” I suggest this represents, not culture causing the sexual double standard, but the cumulative history of individuals attempting to influence one another through language. It seems likely that parents (and perhaps other elder kin) have systematically attempted to inculcate one set of sexual attitudes in their daughters and another in their sons, since copulation exposes males and females to very different risks.

Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979)

Some bars are famous for their excellent Guinness. You might think that this is due to the expertise of the barkeeps, or something special about the plumbing. It turns out, however, that the major determinant of the goodness of Guinness is how long the barrel has been open. The shorter the length of time, the better the beer. This opens the door to a strange inversion in our understanding of the cause of the bar’s reputation. We think that the bar’s reputation is due to the unusual goodness of the Guinness it serves. But in fact, the bar’s reputation for serving good Guinness is what makes so many people order Guinness there, and it is the resulting rapid turnover that makes the Guinness there taste so good.

Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (2023)

For most of my adult life I’d felt that to become a person of complex and stirring character, a person (as I put it) of “inner consequence,” I must break myself into pieces—hammer, saw, chisel away at the unworthy parts—then rebuild. It was laborious. Like stone masonry.

And on the stone masonry model the human self says go on. Admires itself for saying go on, and proceeds to…Go On.

As I went on, I grew dissatisfied. This edifice was too fixed. I wanted it to become an apparatus of mobile parts. Parts that fuse, burst, fracture, cluster, hurtle and drift. I wanted to hear its continuous thrum. THRUM go the materials of my life. Chosen, imposed, inherited, made up. I imagined it as a nervous system. But not the standard biological one. It was an assemblage. My nervous system is my structure of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and words.

—
Repeat After ME:

It’s time to construct another nervous system.

Margo Jefferson, Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir (2022)

There were a few glances at the hotel when I was checking in, and in the fine restaurant just up the road; there are always glances. There are glances in Zürich, where I spent the summer, and there are glances in New York City, which has been my home for fourteen years. There are glances all over Europe and in India, and anywhere I go outside Africa. The test is how long the glances last, whether they become stares, with what intent they occur, whether they contain any degree of hostility or mockery, and to what extent connections, money, or mode of dress shield me in these situations. To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially.

Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays (2016)

In Sihanouk, there was something of King Julian, the ludicrous King of the Lemurs from the children’s animation Madagascar: his manic self-esteem, his tendency to high-pitched giggles, his paternalistic condescension to his subjects (‘the little people’). But in his repression of opposition, there was nothing remotely absurd. Sihanouk’s self-indulgence contrasted grotesquely with his capacity for brutality: as domestic dissent grew in the last few years of the 1960s, especially on the left, he allowed his armed forces to suppress it with impunity. Trucks loaded with the decapitated heads of those who had fallen foul of the army would tour Phnom Penh to terrify other would-be insurgents. He ordered forty teachers accused of subversion to be thrown off a cliff.86 When rumour whispered (untruly, as it happened) that Sihanouk had disposed of two leftist critics by rolling over their heads with a bulldozer, and of a third by dissolving him in sulphuric acid, the story was easily accepted.

Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (2019)