The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it'll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean." "Who's-" "Because you're gay.

You know if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty-one feet farther than your shoes?

There is no word in the English language for the feeling someone gets when they suddenly realize they're standing next to an unholy monster impersonating a human. Monstralization, maybe?

The Confucians paid a great deal attention to ritual, highlighting the ones that expressed the sorts of affective attitudes one wants to cultivate, engaging in them with keen awareness of their value for shaping and reshaping the self, and insisting on the need to be emotionally present to their significance for one's relationship to others. If we Americans want to rebuild our capacities for a shared life, we would do well to pay attention to all this.

But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.

Learning what it is to be among other human beings includes learning that they can be different from us as well as similar. We imagine what it would be like to experience the world differently from their locations, nor our own. We might still use analogies to understand others, but analogies point to similarities that co-exist with differences. Similar in some respects is consistent with different in other respects.

I fear that our loss of a sense of connection with, and duties to, each other leaves us unable to effectively address growing inequality and the bitter antagonism between different communities in American society. We've been at our best when we've felt in significant degree that our fates bound up with each other, where we've had a very inclusive sense of the other, and that's now very much not the case.