At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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It was after he had a child and a mortgage, he said, that he dug into producing sync music. The work was steady, the licensing fees could provide a middle-class life and the market was so robust that it seemed to dwarf everything else you might think of as music.
~ Ryan Francis Bradley via The New York Times Magazine
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It’s easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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The church that Joseph Smith set about building was almost achingly American. He held up the Constitution as a quasi-canonical work of providence. He published a new sacred text, the Book of Mormon, that centered on Jesus visiting the ancient Americas. He even taught that God had brought about the American Revolution so that his Church could be restored in a free country—thus linking Mormonism’s success to that of the American experiment. And yet, almost as soon as Smith started attracting converts, they were derided as un-American.
~ McKay Coppins via The Atlantic
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The story of the Latter-day Saints begins with a confused teenage boy. It was the spring of 1820, and the town of Palmyra, New York, was in the throes of the Second Great Awakening. Fevered Christian revivals were everywhere. New sects were sprouting, and preachers competed fiercely for converts. To Joseph Smith, a 14-year-old farm boy with little education, the frenzy was at once exhilarating and disorienting. As he would later write in his personal history, he became consumed with the question of which church to join—sampling worship services, consulting scripturians, and growing ever more concerned about the state of his soul.
~ McKay Coppins via The Atlantic
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Coverage of Silicon Valley increasingly reminds me of coverage of China, where a legacy media reporter might parachute in, write a dispatch on something that looks deranged, and leave without moving past caricature.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
~ H. L. Mencken
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A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.
~ Yonatan Touval via The New York Times
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By pretty much every measure, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has defied the expectations of its early observers. In the years immediately after its founding—as Mormons were being chased across the country by state-sanctioned mobs—skeptics predicted that the movement would collapse before the century was out. Instead, it became one of the fastest-growing religions in the world. The Church now averages nearly 700 converts a day; it has temples in 66 countries and financial reserves rumored to exceed $100 billion.
~ McKay Coppins via The Atlantic
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By reimagining college-admissions criteria, James Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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