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
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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
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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
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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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It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
~ James Gleick
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Guns are the instrument, not the impulse. The impulse is despair. What was once a nation of builders has become a shoddy patchwork of spectators. The town square has been digitized, drained of life, and controlled by the algorithm. Millions live surrounded by constant noise yet starved of connection. For a few, the gun becomes a merciless megaphone, a way to make the world hear what it ignored.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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The current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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