Relatedly, the media’s coverage of itself and the academy will become even more annoying, until it consumes much of the industry—soon, every other story will be about a woke professor who spent his department’s budget on the racial dynamics of Labubus or whatever. Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but I do think that the humans left in the industry will only get more self-obsessed and cloistered as the shutters hit the ground.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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All I own are the clothes on my back and some personal possessions. I have no assets. I want no assets, and I need no assets. My parents are dead. I am not married, I have no kids. I don’t need an estate. If anything happens to me, the law firm has a one-million-dollar policy on my life.
~ Roy Cohn via The New Yorker
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The common error of the myths of progress is the more or less clear belief that a kind of fatality makes material progress, that is, the development of the means of production, coincide with not only the material but even the spiritual interests of man.
~ Jacques Ellul via American Affairs
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At once not quite real and all too real, Roy M. Cohn has the uncanny presence of a ghoul or a fiend. He is a creature from the depths of the American political imagination, too pure in his utter malignity to be entirely credible, too potent in his continuing consequence to be safely interred in the past.
~ Fintan O’Toole via The New York Review of Books
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China is happy to put out statements, but it has no interest in stepping in as a crisis manager. It wants greater influence, but it also wants to avoid responsibilities.
~ Patricia Kim, an expert at the Brookings Institution via The New Yorker
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The progymnasmata were a sequence of rhetorical exercises, graduated in difficulty, designed to build a student’s capacity for argument, the way a training program builds a runner’s endurance: incrementally, with each exercise preparing the ground for the next. The goal was not a finished piece of writing but a strengthened mind.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker
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People like to go to work. They like to interact with humans. Many workers are older and have grown used to certain ways of doing business. That won’t all go away just because Claude is standing outside your office waiting for word to kick you out.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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However strange our new world will become, there will always be a class of people who want to engage with essays and books. Over the long term, writing might enjoy the fate of the opera and the symphony.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Almost thirty years later, a tenant living in one of Fred Trump’s first major developments, the Beach Haven apartment complex, in Brooklyn, was so disturbed by the racial discrimination he observed from the management that he wrote a song about it. The song was called “Old Man Trump.” The tenant was Woody Guthrie.
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker
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China’s leaders have long believed that technology can help the state overcome the disorder of human affairs.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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