In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
:::
I didn’t intend the 10 principles of good design to be set in stone forever.
~ Dieter Rams
:::
Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
:::
Conservatives are right that fathers matter; liberals are right that easy access to assault weapons amplifies catastrophe. Both truths stand. But legislation alone will not heal a culture where despair metastasizes faster than hope. What’s needed is more mentors, not more metal detectors. Communities must learn to listen before they punish. Schools must treat warning signs as pleas, not paperwork.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
:::
As progressive Americans have become more secular, the academy has become their primary moral training ground. The results have not been good.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
:::
Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.
~ Adam Grant
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
:::
If experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
~ H. L. Mencken
:::
If you control the choke points of social mobility, then you control the nation’s culture. And if you change the criteria for admission at places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you change the nation’s social ideal.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
:::
We have now, for better or worse, entered the Age of Artificial Intelligence. AI is already good at regurgitating information from a lecture. AI is already good at standardized tests. AI can already write papers that would get A’s at Harvard. If you’re hiring the students who are good at those things, you’re hiring people whose talents might soon be obsolete.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
:::