Most of us have become accustomed to the idea that government either cannot or will not just do things. Zilch, it seems, can be done about climate change, war, the housing crisis, inflation, or inadequate medical coverage and child care. The basic political legitimacy of our republic, the abundance movement claims, depends on its tangible achievements.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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The war within the Republican Party was not principally an ideological war, though. It was a class war. A patrician like George H.W. Bush was educated to accept that advanced art and literature could be offensive. Being offensive was its social role, harmless as long as the art was safely ensconced in a museum. If you didn’t like the art, you didn’t go to the museum.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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One advantage for the US and China is that both countries are at least interested in growth. You don’t have to convince the elites or the populace that growth is good or that entrepreneurs could be celebrated. Meanwhile in Europe, perhaps 15 percent of the electorate actively believes in degrowth. I feel it’s impossible to convince Europeans to act in their self interest. You can’t even convince them to adopt air conditioning in the summer.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
“AI threatens the shared social fabric of MIT and creates new risks to the well-being of our students. MIT needs to invest in creating shared norms, establishing new community rituals, and addressing new academic, social, and emotional challenges introduced (or exacerbated) by AI.”
Published on August 13, 2026.
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Europeans are gradually realizing that they have been duped, that there can be no technological power without protecting start-ups from foreign direct investment and subsidizing a homegrown digital ecosystem. Disruptive innovations present too many risks to come from the private sector alone. European leaders have therefore had to accept, for better or worse, this symbiotic proximity between Silicon Valley and American state power, through such items as Elon Musk’s participation in the U.S. administration, or Mark Zuckerberg’s changes in Meta’s moderation policy to make it more compatible with Donald Trump’s line. None of this is to mention the president’s constant threats of retaliation against the European Union and other jurisdictions for their digital regulation policies.
~ Baptiste Detombe via American Affairs
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Finding broadly shared truths and convictions is becoming nearly impossible, and this has enabled the cultural rise of tech and finance, which are governed by a specific kind of quantitative thinking.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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Large language models and the long shadow of the job market—are we grading for the student or for the gatekeepers beyond graduation?—have disrupted a centuries-old educational paradigm. The stick is broken and the carrot has lost its taste. If the process is the goal, we should be focussing on how to create classrooms that make the process feel worth doing for its own sake.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker
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You can live in an alternate reality in China, in Russia, or in the United States. That is always a dangerous proposition, because you might miss the signals of history coming your way.
~ Joerg Wuttke, former head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China via The New Yorker
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More than anything else, Roy M. Cohn was a swindler, and like all good con men he knew how to disappear from the domain of hard facts.
~ Fintan O’Toole via The New York Review of Books
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The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect.
~ Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic
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