A biography for Alissa Quarthasn’t been written yet.
“Giftedness gives you this amazing tool kit for handling self-discipline and gives you an area of knowledge, but then it also gives you this weird set of aspirations.”
“Motherhood gives you access to a range of different intellectual experiences and ways of seeing the world, which, in a way, makes you more flexible in the workplace. But our employers, our colleagues, don't necessarily understand.”
“There are actually very few deeply 'gifted' kids with transcendent cognitive or artistic abilities.”
“While more people are working later in life because of happy things like longer life expectancy, they are also doing so because of very sad things, like a lack of Social Security benefits or retirement plans.”
“Unnatural constructs - cities and medical pain management - have always seemed pretty good to me.”
“Mothers suffer in the workplace. That fact is by now so painfully familiar it even has a name: the motherhood penalty.”
“In 'Ozark,' the truism that we are not as likely to do as well as our parents did in the past is front and center.”
“Approximating authenticity online is not such a tall order. In fact, it may be the very least we can do.”
“Having been built in the fashion I was as a child - created and then deflated - has left me with a distinct feeling of failure. Because I did not live up to my precocity, I experience it to be like a cross between a has-been and a never-was.”
“Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities.”
“A lot of the things that bore adults don't bore children, and people forget that. In some ways, boredom is a projection of adults because we can't remember what childhood was like.”
“When I was a young child, professional aspiration was synonymous to me with the clatter of my mother's high-heeled boots as she went off to teach each 1970s weekday morning, carrying her graded blue books under her arm.”
“There are caste systems in American cities: Many are marginalized to the edges of urban centers due to real estate costs; price tags seem to lurk around human encounters; there's a cult of overwork in the middle class; workers at your local manicurist, your local fast casual restaurant, are exploited.”
“To be sure, many cultural elite pastimes are easily mocked and annoying.”
“I was just a bright, driven kid.”
“Instead of working to give robots personhood status, we should concentrate on protecting our human workers. If that means developing a more cooperative approach to ownership of autonomous trucks so millions of drivers are not left out in the literal cold, so be it.”
“Precariousness is not just a working-class thing.”
“Parents who press their children to succeed do so in hopes of preparing them for an adulthood of high achievement.”
“Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.”
“An IPO-mad technology boom made 'selling out' itself into an honorific.”