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Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

If I’m really not enjoying a book, I bog down after 50 pages or so and stop. In those cases, I try to remind myself that not every book was written specifically for my tastes and that it’s best not to confuse my own preferences with gospel truth. I also find it useful to recognize that the writer may have spent years writing the book and knows it better — or at least deeper — than I do, so maybe the fault or flaw resides partially or completely in me.

There’s little indication that Biden’s remarks on this occasion—which were lucid, thoughtful, and, as Yglesias noted, cogent—or that any of the countless hours of footage from this past year alone of Biden being oratorically and rhetorically compelling, have meaningfully factored into the media’s appraisal of Biden’s cognitive state

Instead, the media has run headlong toward a narrative constructed by the very people politically incentivized to paint Biden in as unflattering a light as possible. When news organizations uncritically accept, rather than journalistically evaluate, the assumption that Biden is severely cognitively compromised in the first place, they effectively grant the right-wing influencers who spend their days curating Biden gaffe supercuts the opportunity to set the terms of the debate

Why does the media take at face value that the viral posts showcasing Biden’s gaffes and slip-ups are truly representative of his current state? 

this trap: escalation of commitment to a losing course of action. In the face of impending failure, extensive evidence shows that instead of rethinking our plans, we often double down on our decisions.

It feels better to be a fighter than a quitter.

we can’t know for sure which decisions will turn out to be good. But decades of research led by the organizational psychologist Barry Staw have identified a few conditions that make people especially likely to persist on ill-fated paths.