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
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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
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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
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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 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
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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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Anthropic’s headquarters, in downtown San Francisco, sits in the shadow of the Salesforce tower. There is no exterior signage. The lobby radiates the personality, warmth, and candor of a Swiss bank.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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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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