The Nix

by Nathan Hill

“Because when all you have is the memory of a thing,” she said, “all you can think about is how the thing is gone.” “I don’t think that’s true.”

It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”

The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them.

She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.

just about everyone on earth by now is paying for some evil committed by a previous generation?

anyone who thinks television can bring the nation together to have a real dialogue and begin to understand one another with empathy and compassion is suffering a great delusion.

Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”