First-semester freshman grades at M.I.T. are reported as either pass or no record, to allow students time to get accustomed to an increased college workload and different teaching methods, the M.I.T. Registrar’s Office explains on its website.
~ Mark Arsenault via The New York Times
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I have no attachment to fame and no desire to preserve it for its own sake. What I want is enough freedom and time to build a life centered on thought. That life requires some money, but not very much.
~ Yiyang Zhuge via Wired Magazine.
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At root, intersectionality teaches that the relative victim status of various groups is the deepest truth, and this framework must drive our interpretation of both natural and built reality. Truth, moral claims, beauty, dignity, the explanatory value of a research insight—all of these must be subjugated to a prior determination of the historical power or powerlessness of certain sociological categories.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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Thoughtless reliance on technology is a liability.
~ Jim Collins, Good to Great
via The New Yorker:
The Mentor: How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything.
by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark
published on August 3, 2026
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The golden era for the depiction of food in art came with the popularization of the still life in seventeenth-century Holland. The first society to experience the problem of having too much money and too much stuff, the Dutch had multiple genres of food-related still lifes, each dealing in a different level of luxury. They began with the humble ontbijtjes, or breakfast paintings, to the slightly more elaborate banketjestukken or “little banquets,” and on to the kings of them all, the pronkstilleven, from the Dutch word for “ostentatious.”
~ Jacob Mikanowski
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