Overthinking. I tend to conflate the amount of time spent on something with how good it is. Sometimes intuition is better than proof, and gut instinct better than hours of “work.”

I have the same academic disease that any academic will understand, that I get focused on the interesting because that’s appealing to me. Most of the time, most answers are boring. “It’s a respiratory disease. Wear a mask.” That’s a boring example. Trying to be too clever, too smart, almost too contrarian sometimes — I would say that is something that I fight in myself because, like a lot of academics and a lot of intellectual people, I like the answers that surprise me.

I question everything. This is also my greatest intellectual habit.

inversion frequently will solve problems which nothing else will solve. And in life, unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems that you can't solve in other ways.

Writers we think are all wrong and want to read anyway come in two kinds: those who are good writers and bad thinkers — Christopher Hitchens, Norman Podhoretz, and Gore Vidal, each in his terribly different way, are instances of that — and those who may not be original stylists but who we admire for trying to be better thinkers than they were before, stumbling toward truth from a starting place very different from the one we happened to inherit. I disagree, for instance, with David Frum about almost everything, from Iraq to the legacy of Pierre Trudeau in our native Canada, but never doubt his integrity or desire to tell the truth about the world.

Well, it certainly influences my manner of writing, because I always see Darwin as a model of the act of explanation and of argument; the morality, the ethics of explanation, maybe.