Jealousy and Envy
Jealousy mixes several experiences: fear of loss, suspicion, wounded dignity, a wish to control, and a real breach of an agreement. Simply forbidding yourself to be jealous is hard and…
Curiosity with a screwdriver
The world gets clearer once things stop being black boxes. Why does a fridge move heat outwards while staying cold inside? How does water get to the top floor? Why…
What Is Marriage For?
No one calls a good thing a defect — in Russian the word for marriage does double duty. — Folk irony When marriage joined fields, debts and kin groups, the…
The Rules Were Written by Other People’s Mistakes
Overconfidence likes to treat instructions as redundant: they are written for the careless, and an experienced person can get by on common sense. In practice many rules are a short…
Money Is Not the Last Reason
The morality of vocation likes to set money against real work: a decent person picks meaning, and only someone with nothing to be proud of thinks about the pay. This…
Judge After You Reconstruct
Collective judgment likes ready-made motives: lazy, selfish, ungrateful, irresponsible. Someone else’s act is visible from the outside; their circumstances, knowledge and constraints are often not. Before condemning, it helps to…