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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In the past quarter century, food culture has become ever more personal and confessional; perhaps the inevitable conclusion was that it would encompass, well, its inevitable conclusion. Like so many trends, this one was pioneered by gay men: one of the early luminaries of FibreTok was a sex educator and amateur chef named Alex Hall, who posts recipes on an account called The Bottom’s Digest. I admit to feeling some relief around the breaking of this taboo—after all, everyone poops, and we might as well do it better.
~ Hannah Goldfield via The New Yorker
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A 2026 study found that nafta had a directly measurable impact on American lifespans. Communities exposed to Mexican import competition experienced, on average, a 0.68 percent increase in annual age-adjusted mortality over the fifteen years following the agreement, an effect the authors concluded was large enough to erase prior estimates of nafta’s aggregate welfare gains.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs
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Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight.
~ Iain Banks
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Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t.
~ Tyler Durden
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As a young man, Gavin Newsom was often described in the media as having movie-star good looks. He certainly wields his face the way a movie star does: with the care and precision with which most people handle power tools.
~ Nathan Heller via The New Yorker
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There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
~ Ansel Adams
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Jane Austen and Charles Dickens were both masters of comedy, but the contrast between her ironic understatement and his histrionic exaggeration reflects profoundly different personalities and life experiences, in which class and gender played an important part.
~ Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic
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Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot.
~ Ted Chiang via The Atlantic
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Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure.
~ Donella Meadows
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