:::
Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay
Campus Life at
Five American Universities
to follow on LinkedIn
Quote, Unquote
Today’s music is treated like a free-flowing utility: It’s added to spaces the way air-conditioning is, providing the right vibe for TV shows, YouTube tutorials, stores, study sessions. That means many of today’s musicians, instead of selling records, operate more like the people who once played the piano in department-store lobbies, the organ at baseball games or the accordion in 19th-century cafes: Their job is to provide the appropriate background noise for some other experience.
~ Ryan Francis Bradley via The New York Times Magazine
:::
Quote, Unquote
Charles Darwin found sex a mystery. He was perplexed not by the practice—he and his wife, who also happened to be his cousin, had ten children—but by the point of it.
~ Elizabeth Kolbert via The New Yorker
:::
Campus Life at
Kent State University
Five MIT-related accounts
to follow on Twitter
Interesting Read
Interesting Read
via The New York Times:
What’s Next for the G.O.P. After Trump? This Political Scientist Has a Guess.
by Seth Masket and John Guida
published on July 17, 2026
:::
Quote, Unquote
Starting a new form of government at the close of an era, as the founders of the European Union tried to do, is not necessarily a doomed project. The United States might be called the last nation that was established before the onset of the Industrial Revolution. But you cannot really have an overarching federal government, such as the United States has, unless people are content to see the states lose power to the capital over the long term. Americans have made their peace with this, although it required a civil war and a good deal of other violence to bring consensus.
~ Christopher Caldwell via The New York Times
:::