Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski · 24 Jun 2013 · 662pp · 180,546 words
harbor a penchant for crunch porn. By 2012, it seems most people had begun to tune out most serious discussions, and flee the tsunami of l’esprit de l’escalier. There was a short interlude when editorial cartoonists and TV comedians tried to turn the whole thing into a joke, portraying how buffoon
Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole · 5 Mar 2020 · 385pp · 121,550 words
well but, as the Brexit saga reminds us, the ability to make a dignified exit is even more important. There is a lovely French phrase, l’esprit de l’escalier, that signifies the moment at the bottom of the staircase when you think of what you should have said as you were leaving
Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil · 25 Feb 2020 · 239pp · 80,319 words
preserve memories as much as it was a way to communicate with others and extinguish loneliness. It is either that there are no feelings of l’esprit de l’escalier on the internet or that the internet is all staircase wit. Social media on mobile had a different tempo and friction as users
The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
by Brian Christian · 1 Mar 2011 · 370pp · 94,968 words
] a bit long to answer a judge as the computer [couldn’t] handle that amount of data smoothly.” I think of the great French idiom l’esprit de l’escalier, “staircase wit,” the devastating verbal comeback that occurs to you as you’re walking down the stairs out of the party. Finding the
This Is Life
by Dan Rhodes · 1 Mar 2012
way through the baby’s bag in search of his hat, which she put on his head. As she did so, she was haunted by l’esprit de l’escalier: she would have saved a lot of bother if she hadn’t hidden Herbert from Old Widow Peypouquet, and had just told her
Back to Blood
by Tom Wolfe · 1 Jan 2012 · 687pp · 204,164 words
should have made… to obliterate that bastard who kept scoring points off you in conversation at dinner this evening… not that Magdalena knew the term l’esprit de l’escalier, but she was living it right now… furiously, uselessly ransacking her brain. Sergei was in such good spirits, he never noticed how silent
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker · 13 Feb 2018 · 1,034pp · 241,773 words
, and most of all myself, I mustered a reasonably creditable answer. What I recall saying—embellished, to be sure, by the distortions of memory and l’esprit de l’escalier, the wit of the staircase—went something like this: In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your
Surfaces and Essences
by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander · 10 Sep 2012 · 1,079pp · 321,718 words
the philosopher Denis Diderot, that has no good English counterpart (and of course this one isn’t unique; there are hundreds of others) — namely, “avoir l’esprit d’escalier”. What does this mean? Well, translated literally (in the manner of Jean-Loup Chiflet’s books), it means “to have the spirit of staircase
Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
by Steven Johnson · 2 Jan 1999 · 294pp · 86,601 words
the prisoner’s dilemma. Your brain suddenly stands at attention: “Hey, what was that?” You can see this mechanism captured in the wonderful French expression l’esprit d’escalier-literally, “the wit of the staircase”-that the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations defines as follows: “An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that
Know Thyself
by Stephen M Fleming · 27 Apr 2021
errors and regret our mistakes if we know what we should have done but didn’t do. The French have a wonderful phrase for this: “L’esprit d’escalier,” or staircase wit. These are the things you realize you should have said upon descending the stairs on your way out of a party
Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie · 20 Jul 2020