However strange our new world will become, there will always be a class of people who want to engage with essays and books. Over the long term, writing might enjoy the fate of the opera and the symphony.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
Quote, Unquote
Almost thirty years later, a tenant living in one of Fred Trump’s first major developments, the Beach Haven apartment complex, in Brooklyn, was so disturbed by the racial discrimination he observed from the management that he wrote a song about it. The song was called “Old Man Trump.” The tenant was Woody Guthrie.
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker
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Quote, Unquote
China’s leaders have long believed that technology can help the state overcome the disorder of human affairs.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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Passivity and excitability are the two traits of a new humanity, bound hand and foot to Uncle Sam, indifferent to its enslavement as the enjoyment of consumption and immediate desire became its only horizon. In this respect, the libertarian movements of 1968 merely paved the way for a process of erasing the past and the historicity of peoples, which was to take full root in the migration from a physical and cultural world to a digital and ahistorical world.
~ Baptiste Detombe via American Affairs
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This was the moment when I realized that social media had empowered drive-by whinings by sociopaths, and that progressive politics had allowed them to cloak themselves in righteousness. What might once have been recognized as narcissism, jealousy, the result of a personality disorder—or just plain boredom—was now transfigured into “calling out” those who had erred.
~ Helen Lewis via The Atlantic
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Although young college graduates still experience relatively low unemployment and make decent wages, they have clear and sound reasons to feel more financially precarious than one might expect. The most obvious and long-standing reason is housing: many young people measure their economic maturity through homeownership, and buying a house is becoming nearly impossible in many major metropolitan areas.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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Donald Trump’s father had reared him to have cutthroat ambition. But Roy Cohn taught him tactics.
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker
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The Industrial Revolution happened without any theoretical knowledge of the physical principles that drove it. It took more than a century for us to piece together the laws of thermodynamics. This scientific advance led to such debatably beneficial things as the smartphone. But it also helped us explain why time flows forward, galaxies exist, and our universal fate is heat death.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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Many of Beijing’s tech companies are in the Zhongguancun district, a cluster of office complexes set on land that, during the imperial era, served as a burial ground for palace eunuchs. For a generation, Zhongguancun has evolved with each passing fashion in tech. These days, advertisements for A.I. products are rapidly replacing washed-out ads for the metaverse.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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Stalin was fond of telling a story from his experience in Leipzig in 1907, when, to his astonishment, 200 German workers failed to turn up to a socialist meeting because no ticket controller was on the platform to punch their train tickets, citing this experience as proof of the hopelessness of Germanic obedience. Could anyone imagine Chinese or Americans being so obedient?
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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