Attention Economy


Saturday, April 11, 2020

The Wrong Kind of Exceptionalism

Coronavirus has exposed the myth of British exceptionalism

The American Exception by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith notes:
“Death absolute is the truth of our existence as a whole, of course, but America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole, preferring instead to attack death as a series of discrete problems. Wars on drugs, cancer, poverty, and so on. Not that there is anything ridiculous about trying to lengthen the distance between the dates on our birth certificates and the ones on our tombstones: ethical life depends on the meaningfulness of that effort. But perhaps nowhere in the world has this effort—and its relative success—been linked so emphatically to money as it is in America”.

A tale of two New Yorks: pandemic lays bare a city's shocking inequities