As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.

Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.