It was fine to take a devil-may-care attitude toward automated cat-identification. But it wouldn’t be fair, for example, to have a machine evaluate an applicant’s mortgage eligibility in an opaque way. And, if you employed a robot to keep your house clean of dog hair, you wanted to be certain that it would vacuum the couch, not kill the dog.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.
~ H. L. Mencken
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A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.
~ Yonatan Touval via The New York Times
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In the realm of sports talk, kindness is unrelatable; it’s alien, even. What’s relatable is irrationally caring for your team and irrationally hating its rivals—not pandering by saying that you happen to like all of the teams in key Rust Belt swing states.
~ Nathaniel Frum via The Atlantic
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Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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Kafka was a realist.
~ György Lukács
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Life in the Instagram bubble requires a constant calibration of how it will be viewed from outside.
~ Jacob Mikanowski
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Part of believing in capitalism is you don’t have to feel guilty
~ David Sacks via The Atlantic
The culture war is burning too hot for a class war to snuff it out anytime soon.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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Some writers work like sculptors: they produce something fully chiseled that could stand forever. Novelists tend to be like that. Rather than being a sculptor, I see myself as being a musician. After a performance, no matter how it goes, the musician’s task is to start practicing for the next one.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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