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“Why? Why? Why?” your child asks, and you don’t know the answer. Your task as a parent is to keep human life going a little longer, but sometimes you find yourself wondering, what’s so great about human life? Why do we need more of it? Raising kids makes this feeling more acute. Not just because yo…

“Then just play the song, and I won’t be mean.” I knew I was in the wrong now, but I couldn’t bring myself back into the right. I had too much momentum.

“I don’t wanna play the song.”

“JUST PLAY IT!” I saw Julian’s face crumple first, his chin wrinkle, before I heard how my voice sounded: g…

[...] One reason you end up becoming deeply invested in your child’s potential is that parenting forces you to recognize your own limitations as a human being.

At the heart of Claire Denis’s 2018 film High Life is the bond between a parent and child. Monte, played by Robert Pattinson, is the parent. When he was a boy, he killed a friend of his and is now, as the film opens, serving a life sentence. Rather than living out his days in a cell, however, Monte…

I don’t mean to suggest that doing your utmost to foster a culture it would be good to grow up in is the rational choice in the game-theory sense; the expected probability of success is far too low for that. Nor would I see it merely as a moral obligation that you incur when you bring children into…