Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Category Archives: 0747 – Quote Unquote
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The two were cremated and had their ashes scattered in the Atlantic, an unreachable grave site, which intensified the irrational feeling that the couple had disappeared on some journey—where to, we don’t know.
~ Doreen St. Félix via The New Yorker
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The U.S. dollar functions as a kind of “natural resource” that the United States produces to satisfy global demand for dollar-denominated reserves.38 But how far this can be taken is unclear. A shock to confidence in U.S. institutional governance (a debt ceiling default, for instance) could trigger a compounding panic and a free fall of the dollar. The United States is in uncharted waters.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs
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The problem with overstuffed to-do lists isn’t just the total time required to execute their contents, but the fact that each new commitment generates its own ongoing administrative demands—emails, chats, check-in calls, “quick” meetings. That’s the overhead tax. Before long, knowledge workers find themselves spending the bulk of their time talking about work instead of actually doing it.
~ Cal Newport via The Atlantic
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For all of the exhilarating possibilities A.I. brings to medicine — diagnosing rare diseases, predicting individuals’ risks, discovering elusive drugs — one of its strongest footholds in health care today is its ability to eavesdrop on conversations and quickly generate notes from them.
~ Helen Ouyang via The New York Times Magazine
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Anybody who embarks on a study of plagiarism hoping for bright lines is in for a foggy shock. Here is the land of blur.
~ Anthony Lane via The New Yorker
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The fear of body bags has been one of the greatest deterrents to conflict in history. Mass-produced, expendable robots do not carry the human or financial costs that have tempered the urge to go to war for centuries.
~ W.J. Hennigan via The New York Times
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Resitance is by nature reactive; it is not forward-looking.
~ Mark Lilla
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If we all spoke circumspectly and wisely all the time, who would even need institutional free-speech policies? The point of speech rules is to allow space for the unguarded and the ill-tempered, for the provocative and prickly person as well as the smooth and sinuous. The smooth and sinuous will seldom say anything worth hearing in the first place.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Compared with protein, which lends itself to narratives of growth—more grams, more gains—fibre is a bit of a hard sell, likelier to be espoused by women in sensible shoes than by fitness junkies on Twitch. But the benefits of eating a high-fibre diet are arguably more significant. Gastroenterologists and influencers alike are eager to explain that fibre affects health beyond gut motility, formerly known as shitting: it slows digestion, which can make you feel full for longer and help manage blood sugar and body weight, and has been shown to lower cholesterol and blood pressure.
~ Hannah Goldfield via The New Yorker
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