It’s funny that PDFs sometimes circulate better than web-optimized pages; there’s something about strict formatting that establishes authority. Physical books can also last a long time.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
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What determines a society’s health is not the existence of an elite, but the effectiveness of the elite, and whether the relationship between the elites and everybody else is mutually respectful.
~ David Brooks via The Atlantic
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Americans have always flirted with the end of the world. But now, for the first time, the preppers, the prophets, the climate modelers, the AI-worriers and the geopolitical realists can all point to different dashboards flashing red at the same time.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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Just as God shaped man in his own image from clay, Europe was to be shaped by the United States according to its will. Immersion in consumer society was not enough; the same logic demanded the penetration not only of households and groceries with American wares but of people’s minds with American ideas and norms.
~ Baptiste Detombe via American Affairs
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The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
~ Søren Kierkegaard
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Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect in its own bad way.
~ John Ruskin
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A disproportionate number of Anthropic employees seem to be the children of novelists or poets. Still, their first stabs at screenwriting lacked a certain je ne sais quoi: in one scintillating exchange, the Human asks the Assistant if it’s actually important to add salt to spaghetti water.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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New York Mayor Ed Koch was annoyed, and he later referred to Donald Trump as “piggy, piggy, piggy.” In return, Trump called him a moron. The Mayor, he said, was “extremely nasty, mean-spirited, and very vicious, an extremely disloyal human being.”
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker
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Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
~ Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic
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Youth sentiment is a notoriously hard thing to track. Polling is a fraught enough enterprise without having to deal with flaky kids, occasionally impenetrable survey questions, and the real possibility that words such as “confidence” or “satisfied” might not mean the same thing from one generation to the next.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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