From the archive

Your principles end where the discount begins

I like watching how quickly the vocabulary changes. Someone else's bribe is corruption. Yours is a token of gratitude. Someone else's connections are nepotism. Yours are normal human relationships. Someone else's silence was bought. You're just being professional and keeping work separate from politics. Every convenience gets its own tidy name. So you never have to put two sentences next to each other: “I condemn this” and “I benefit from this.” Together, they look pretty fucking bad. Separately, they fit perfectly well into the same biography.