The Selfishness of Novak Djokovic; The Atlantic, January 15, 2022

Jemele Hill, The Atlantic; The Selfishness of Novak Djokovic

"Sacrificing is what caring communities do—and it’s something Djokovic knows nothing about. As the top player in men’s tennis, Djokovic has a responsibility to be a good ambassador for his sport. But that, like Australia’s COVID rules, is just another requirement that he’s failed to meet."

Opinion: Where was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mask?; The Washington Post, January 7, 2022

 Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post; Opinion: Where was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mask?

"The sad part here is that Gorsuch is more emblem than outlier. The pandemic has brought out the best in some of us, but the worst — the most selfish and irresponsible — in too many others. This “you’re not the boss of me” immaturity has made a difficult period even harder.

Actions that should be understood as minor inconveniences desirable for the greater good have somehow been transformed into intolerable incursions on liberty. Being required to wear a mask has assumed symbolic resonance far in excess of any reasonable objection.

No one is the boss of Justice Gorsuch. Like his colleagues, he had a choice about whether to wear a mask. Unlike them, he chose poorly."

Michael Schur On Ethics And Morality In A Crisis; WBUR, April 9, 2020

Meghna Chakrabarti and Brittany Knotts, WBUR; Michael Schur On Ethics And Morality In A Crisis

"How do you think "The Good Place" characters Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason would have responded to the coronavirus in their Earth lives?...

MICHAEL SCHUR, ON HOW JASON WOULD RESPOND TO THE CORONAVIRUS...

Jason: “Then there's Jason, who is just an idiot. And Jason, I don't know if you saw one of the craziest photos to me of all of the photos we've all been looking at, it was that county line in Florida. ... Where one county had shut down its beaches, and the other county had not. And so as a result, the beach was entirely empty. And there was just like suddenly just a wall of people extending further out, down the beach, because that county's beaches were open. Whatever county that is, that's where Jason would be. … So he and Eleanor probably wouldn't have been dissimilar in terms of the way they approached this, but for different reasons. Eleanor was selfish, and Jason was just sort of impulsive and didn't really think anything through.”...

What do we owe each other? 

Michael Schur: “I said before that there's a certain sort of minimum that is required of everyone, to the best of our abilities. The basics, right. Staying inside, staying away from people, trying to kind of stop the spread of the disease. But then beyond that, there's an enormous sliding scale, I think. If you have the ability to, for example, pay your dog walker, if you have the financial means to continue to pay your dog walker who can't walk your dog anymore, or someone who helps you clean your house, or anybody who works for you in any capacity. If you have that ability, I think you need to do that. And then, you know, you keep sliding up the scale. If you have the ability to keep people on the payroll at your business who are working for you, even if it means you lose money, I think you have to do that, too. And it just keeps going up and up and up."

Kanye West Isn’t the Only Person Behaving Badly at the Theater; The Daily Beast, December 4, 2018

Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast; Kanye West Isn’t the Only Person Behaving Badly at the Theater

"Manners are not just individual, they are collective. Going to a theater where thoughtlessness is so blithely practiced is a sad reminder how we have forgotten, or are forgetting, to occupy collective spaces in a civilized fashion. Theater noise-makers cut across all boundaries of class and age; what they share is a selfishness, of which using a mobile phone is the most visible and rankling example.

Here’s the thing. You are not at home. There are people sitting next to you. There are actors, like Bryan Cranston, trying to do their job a few feet from you. Yes, they are on a set, and yes the stage looks like a fictional world. But actually, we are all there together, and the social contract here is that you keep your mouth shut, and let the actors act. They can hear you. We can hear you."

How Stan Lee Helped Bring Humanity to Superheroes; Comic Book Resources, November 13, 2018

Brian Cronin, Comic Book Resources; How Stan Lee Helped Bring Humanity to Superheroes

"Spider-Man's introduction in Amazing Fantasy #15 achieved two notable goals. One, it took the idea of Reed Richards' cosmic ray screw-up leading to the creation of the Fantastic Four to a whole other level, as now Peter Parker's selfishness almost directly led to the death of his beloved Uncle Ben, giving Spider-Man a painful reminder why he has to be a superhero and two, it took a teen hero and had him not as a sidekick or a younger version of an older hero, but as THE hero."

The worst is yet to come; Washington Post, July 27, 2017

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post; The worst is yet to come

"The Court of Mad King Donald is not a presidency. It is an affliction, one that saps the life out of our democratic institutions, and it must be fiercely resisted if the nation as we know it is to survive.

I wish that were hyperbole. The problem is not just that President Trump is selfish, insecure, egotistical, ignorant and unserious. It is that he neither fully grasps nor minimally respects the concept of honor, without which our governing system falls apart. He believes “honorable” means “obsequious in the service of Trump.” He believes everyone else’s motives are as base as his.

The Trump administration is, indeed, like the court of some accidental monarch who is tragically unsuited for the duties of his throne. However long it persists, we must never allow ourselves to think of the Trump White House as anything but aberrant. We must fight for the norms of American governance lest we forget them in their absence...

Do not become numb to the mad king’s outrages. The worst is yet to come."

Should Teachers Ask Students To Check Their Devices At The Classroom Door?; NPR, 8/5/16

Alva Noe, NPR; Should Teachers Ask Students To Check Their Devices At The Classroom Door? :

"In a post a few weeks back, Tania Lombrozo drew attention to research showing that students using laptops and other digital devices in the college classroom are less likely to perform as well as students not using them...

I can't bring myself to try to ban these new technologies in the classroom because to do so, it seems to me, would be to infringe on the personal liberty of my students.

So what are we to do?

Going forward, I will try to impress on my students that, quite above and beyond the cognitive costs, that is, the decrement in learning, there are social costs. It is rude, basically, to sit there and ignore what is going on around you. It is selfish to disrupt the joint work of the group.

Beyond that, our task, as teachers, must be to engage and capture the attention of these citizens as they are. The new technologies are part of what makes the new person."