1 March 2022 – Words published in 2011, and so very 2022.

Context: The novel’s protagonist, a Nigerian-German psychiatrist in training, walks the streets of New York City and muses about what he sees and experiences. Here, an unseasonably warm fall day triggers a riff on the growing tendency in society to jump to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence.

“This was part of my suspicion that there was a mood in the society that pushed people more toward snap judgments and unexamined opinions, an antiscientific mood; to the old problem of mass innumeracy, it seemed to me, was being added a more general inability to assess evidence. This made brisk business for those whose specialty was in the promising of immediate solutions: politicians, or priests of the various religions. It worked particularly well for those who wished to rally people around a cause. The cause itself, whatever it was, hardly mattered. Partisanship was all.”

— Open City, by Teju Cole, Random House, 2011