The term “culture war” derives from the German Kulturkampf, coined in the time of Bismarck for the conflict between the Catholic Church and the Prussian state. It seems to have entered the American vocabulary largely through the sociologist James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book, “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,” and historians have been refining the story ever since.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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If the charge is that Donald Trump is unsophisticated, they are in some ways right. If you go with him to see an art collection, he’s not that interested. He’d rather look out the windows at buildings.
~ Roy Cohn via The New Yorker
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Loneliness has reached such a point that a town in France has built a bench dedicated solely to social interaction; a sign specifies that it is a place designed for people to meet, implying that the rest of the public space is no longer such a place. 62 percent of young French people today say they feel lonely on a regular or chronic basis: such a rate can only be that of a sick society.
~ Baptiste Detombe via American Affairs
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Religious iconography was on Andres Serrano’s palette from the start. He collects religious artifacts and uses church pews as living-room couches. Like many nonobservant Catholics, he appears to be anticlerical but not anti-Christian.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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Roy Cohn is a man who has triumphed over his tormentors, and he deserves the credit we are here to give him so enthusiastically.
~ William F. Buckley, Jr. via The New Yorker
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The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature. Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire.
~ Yonatan Touval via The New York Times
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There is an awkward serenity to life in the capital of a high-tech, one-party state.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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It’s funny that PDFs sometimes circulate better than web-optimized pages; there’s something about strict formatting that establishes authority. Physical books can also last a long time.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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You can support restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons, but disagree that a defense contract is the optimal vehicle to achieve that policy outcome. The way you achieve new policy outcomes, under the usual rules of our republic, is to pass a law.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
AI is disrupting the social fabric of our campus – and the wider world. The backlash against AI in commencement speeches in the summer of 2026 was just one expression of the discontent many feel about AI itself and the role Big Tech now plays in our society.
Published on August 13, 2026.
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