It shouldn’t be surprising that working-class Americans of color sympathize with migrants but don’t necessarily want an open border, that they fear crime at least as much as police misconduct. But their views confound progressives, who see these issues through the almost metaphysical lens of group identity—the belief that we think inside lines of race, gender, and sexuality, that these accidental and immutable traits dictate our politics.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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The increasingly gerontocratic Communist Party is not so much hovering over them as existing on a slightly different plane, speaking in strange apocalyptic tongues. Over the long run, I bet that the exuberant and rollicking nature of Chinese society will outlive the lusterless political system.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Today, even middle-school students have been so thoroughly assessed that they know whether the adults have deemed them smart or not. The good test-takers get funneled into the meritocratic pressure cooker; the bad test-takers learn, by about age 9 or 10, that society does not value them the same way.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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Twitter is now the most effective way to keep up with breaking news, a singular direct line to the president, and a conspicuously mismanaged experiment in centralized public discourse.
~ John Herrman
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The longer one lives in this world, the more tempting it becomes to escape, and to disappear.
~ Jacob Mikanowski
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We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts.
~ John Ruskin
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Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.
~ John Ruskin
The institution I now lead, the University of Florida, faces all sorts of challenges, and Florida is the site of important battles about the responsibilities of academia to our society. As a public university, our incredibly talented and dedicated faculty aim to provide an elite education that promotes resilience and strength in our students so that they are tough enough, smart enough, and compassionate enough to engage big ideas in a world where people will always disagree.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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We have too many unnecessary things everywhere. I would describe this as inhumane.
~ Dieter Rams
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A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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