Many of Beijing’s tech companies are in the Zhongguancun district, a cluster of office complexes set on land that, during the imperial era, served as a burial ground for palace eunuchs. For a generation, Zhongguancun has evolved with each passing fashion in tech. These days, advertisements for A.I. products are rapidly replacing washed-out ads for the metaverse.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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Stalin was fond of telling a story from his experience in Leipzig in 1907, when, to his astonishment, 200 German workers failed to turn up to a socialist meeting because no ticket controller was on the platform to punch their train tickets, citing this experience as proof of the hopelessness of Germanic obedience. Could anyone imagine Chinese or Americans being so obedient?
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
“MIT should use this moment to ask what forms of presence, collaboration, mentorship, and shared intellectual life are essential to residential education – and then design AI policies, pedagogies, and research practices that strengthen them rather than allow their erosion, replacement, or collapse.”
Published on August 13, 2026.
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Life experienced on phones and through social media leaves us lonely and alienated from one another; this has led to an existence that’s somehow at once both intensely individual and intensely tribal.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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For years, the architecture of higher education quietly encouraged students to believe that the point of a class, and indeed of the entire college experience, was the credential—that the teacher-student relationship was a transactional one that ended with a grade. But if the grade is the goal, and a machine can get you the grade, the machine is not a shortcut; it’s just efficiency.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker
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American rhetoric in defense of its technology industry comes at a time when Europe’s dependence is already well advanced. No sooner have these overtures been called into question than once new arguments arise to sustain European passivity. Recently, freedom of expression has been exploited by the American political establishment to undermine any plans by a foreign state for digital regulation; in this view, regulating the tech sector is construed as an assault on liberty and democracy itself, whose terms are, of course, to be determined and judged by Washington alone. At this juncture, Europe is unable to escape the rhetorical clutches of a United States determined to preserve its technological as well as geopolitical stranglehold.
~ Baptiste Detombe via American Affairs
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Donald Trump is severing ties, imposing tariffs left and right. The Chinese are not moving. So the decision is not ‘Beijing or Washington.’ It is building ties with Jakarta and Delhi, and with other countries.
~ Joerg Wuttke, former head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China via The New Yorker
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It may seem self-serving for a writer at a 169-year-old magazine to carry a torch for reading. But the people who make a living from words are not the only ones who lose out in a postliterate age. Reading is more than a skill, or one mode of communication among many. The media we use to interact with one another shape the world we inhabit.
~ Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic
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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
AI has arrived at a moment when the social foundations of campus life are already under strain. Across higher education, students report10 high levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and disconnection. Confidence in institutions has weakened, political polarization has made campuses more fragile, and the post-pandemic recovery of in-person communities remains incomplete.
Published on August 13, 2026.
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In Chinese, the term for “fortune-telling” shares a character with the term for “algorithm.”
~ Patricia Kim, an expert at the Brookings Institution via The New Yorker
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