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
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Category Archives: 0747 – Quote Unquote
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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
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I would never apologize for photographing rocks. Rocks can be very beautiful.
~ Ansel Adams
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So much of writing is battling your own mind to cough up the clearest idea or best word.
~ Lily Meyer via The Atlantic
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The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves.
~ Ted Chiang via The Atlantic
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Still, the move toward Brexit channelled populist passions that now shape politics on both sides of the Atlantic: a contempt for experts and mainstream institutions; a hatred of liberal cosmopolitan idealism; a shameless embrace and proliferation of misinformation by political opportunists; and agendas anchored more in antipathy for a perceived enemy than in a positive vision for everyone.
~ Ishaan Tharoor via The New Yorker
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Matthew Pitman is six feet tall, with hazel eyes and blond hair, which he keeps buzzed on the sides and floppy on top, or slicked into a stubby pony. He wears wraparound sunglasses with a bandanna or a backward baseball cap, or both. His land speed is a consistent half sprint. He speaks in complete, fluid sentences but, at times, jackhammer fast. No topic escapes his enthusiasm, or his powers of observation.
~ Paige Williams via The New Yorker
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Since the 1990s, political parties across the West have been hemorrhaging members amid a wider weakening of internal structures. While especially damaging on the left, always reliant on popular support, the trend affected forces across the spectrum. As a void opened between voters and parties, many citizens stopped engaging with them and even decided to opt out of voting altogether. The result has been a steady erosion of mainstream parties’ electoral support.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times
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The politics of the Valley was always a liberal sort of libertarianism: pro-choice, pro-immigration, idealistic, even utopian, arrogant about its mission of empowering individuals and connecting humanity, but indifferent to and ignorant of government, with an engineer’s contempt for the creaky workings of bureaucracy and the cluelessness of elected officials.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Large government budget deficits generally worsen the current account, and fiscal tightening tends to improve it. This effect operates partly through the exchange rate: when a government borrows less, there is less demand for foreign capital, which lowers interest rates, allows the currency to depreciate, and improves competitiveness.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs
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