Silicon Valley often speaks in strange tongues, starting podcasts and shows that are popular within the tech world but do not travel far beyond the Bay Area. Though San Francisco has produced so much wealth, it is a relative underperformer in the national culture.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demands.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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In its exclusion of links, minimization of text, and encouragement of gauzy filters, Instagram turns every smartphone into its own little Silver Pavilion, through which the user can both cultivate a world and blot out what they don’t wish to see.
~ Jacob Mikanowski
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Good design is as little as possible. Less, but better, because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
~ Dieter Rams
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The bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test when they are 13 or 18, you will learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society’s greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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I have watched death as it happens, and I have watched birth. What I learned is that neither are discrete events. They are both processes, things that unfold. Birth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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Americans don’t just disagree on policy anymore. They disagree on reality. They disagree on who and what deserves trust. They are, in measurable statistical terms, living in different countries while sharing the same zip codes.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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The radicalization of college-educated Americans who have begun to live the unpleasant realities of their less privileged compatriots—who can hardly afford rent, much less to buy a house and start a family—is an encouraging turn. They could form part of a broader social movement that finally addresses our deepest problems instead of dissolving them in electronic bile. A professional class that identifies with America’s multitudes of have-nots and votes on that basis would be a powerful force for greater equality and opportunity.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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There’s more to the Bay Area than unusual health practices. It is, after all, a place that creates not only new products, but also new modes of living.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you don’t keep succeeding by somebody else’s metrics, your self-worth crumbles.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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