Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.
~ Ted Chiang via The Atlantic
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President Donald Trump did not erode U.S. capabilities on his own. But Trump’s war with Iran has revealed just how the underlying dynamics of global power have shifted—and just how much American might has decayed.
~ Phillips Payson O’Brien via The Atlantic
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The nonchalance with which the Australian greeted the apparent mishap speaks to an evident truth. Faecal incontinence is much more common amongst athletes than might be expected.
~ Jacob Whitehead via The Athletic
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Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Footage of Donals Trump dictating social-media posts to Natalie Harp — who is apparently the person behind some of those strange capitalization decisions — recalls stories of Zhang Yufeng, Mao Zedong’s private secretary, speaking on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party chairman after his strokes.
~ Doreen St. Félix via The New Yorker
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Cryptocurrency is a long-standing libertarian project—the dream of a privatized financial system. The founders of PayPal originally aspired to create a tool that gave people around the world access to finance, including in poor and corrupt countries without reliable banking institutions. But in practice, crypto’s anonymity and volatility have made it extremely prone to criminal activity and risky speculation.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Daniel Kahneman, the behavioral psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, distinguished between two modes of judgment: the quick, intuitive impressions that arise almost automatically and the slower, more effortful reasoning that questions them. A doctor must work in both. Often, I begin to sense a diagnosis as soon as I walk into a patient’s room, before I can fully explain it; when I write my notes, I tend to slow down to do my more deliberate thinking.
~ Helen Ouyang via The New York Times Magazine
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Before 1946, conquering disease would have seemed as much a subject of science fiction as putting a man on the moon. But since 1950, global life expectancy has risen by four years each decade. Smallpox has been eradicated, and polio and malaria cases have dramatically fallen. Within the past 80 years, there have perhaps been more significant advances in human health than there were in the previous 300,000.
~ Vann Newkirk via The Atlantic
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In the late 19th century, as liberal and pacifist movements drove states to formalize international law, European powers sought to eliminate war by rendering conquest illegal. To do so, they defined national sovereignty as an inalienable possession. Occupation came to be understood as a temporary phenomenon distinct from permanent annexation.
~ Linda Kinstler via The New York Times
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
~ Ferris Bueller
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