A.I. has rapidly settled into Chinese work and life. People in China often regard technology with less wariness than Americans do, because living standards have improved so dramatically in the computing era. In the nineteen-seventies, more than seventy per cent of the population worked in agriculture; today, that figure is less than twenty-five per cent.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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One lesson from the latter years of Austro-Hungary is a good reminder that periods of state decay often correspond with eras of cultural flowering.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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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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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
“With respect to evaluation, while AI can be a good way to check assignments against a rubric or automate some aspects of evaluation, many students also have a justifiably strongly negative reaction if, after investing their own time in an assignment, the only feedback they receive is from a machine. “
Published on August 13, 2026.
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The weight of the past no longer matters in a cultural milieu in which the primary imperative is not so much liberty but the constant pursuit of novelty.
~ Baptiste Detombe via American Affairs
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Notably, too, self-reported long COVID is disproportionately high among trans and bi Americans. Unless science uncovers measurable respiratory differences between bisexuals and the rest of the population, one explanation is that more LGBTQ Americans live in social contexts in which vague, unpleasant symptoms such as brain fog are interpreted as long COVID.
~ Helen Lewis via The Atlantic
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Aristotle observed that we become virtuous by performing virtuous acts—that character is cultivated through practice. A similar logic applies to thinking. Intellectual strength isn’t transmitted by lecture or implanted with a diploma. It is built the same way that the figure skater builds a routine or the running back learns to explode through a crack in the line—repetition after repetition, failure after failure, with no shortcut available and no machine that can stand in.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker
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The current world order was built by a group of geniuses, mainly in the United States, who hailed from Europe. If Donald Trump had maintained the order effectively, China would find it very hard to get through. Trump really helped us.
~ Yi Rao – Dean of Peking University’s School of Life Sciences via The New Yorker
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That Roy M. Cohn knew himself to be gay — and therefore to be engaged in covert criminal activity — from an early age seems certain. But in his public life, even in the 1980s, when it would not have mattered very much, he never presented himself as anything other than a straight man who appeared at social events with beautiful starlets or socialites on his arm. His friend the New York Times journalist Sidney Zion wrote that “Roy lived in a closet that was the oddest in history—a closet with neon lights—but he maintained it fiercely.”
~ Fintan O’Toole via The New York Review of Books
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Roy Cohn was of New York, but he deeply resented New York’s intellectuals, its universities, and its élite law firms. Donald Trump has always felt the same resentment.
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker
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