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Two good things I've read recently

I've been hitting the collected nonfiction of Joan Didion pretty hard recently... good stuff:
With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan Baker took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.

.On Self-Respect.

And, quoted in the preface of William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged, Herbert Gans:
The vacuum that is created when no recommendations are attached to a policy proposal can easily be filled by undesirable solutions and the report's conclusions can be conveniently misinterpreted.

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