Convinced he had little talent as a painter or a sculptor, Andres Serrano borrowed a friend’s camera and began taking pictures. He insists he isn’t a photographer, and he doesn’t develop his own prints. He thinks of himself as an artist who uses a camera.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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Progressive Democrats have been trying, with limited success, to convince Americans that billionaires are their true enemy. Well, guess who loves to hate billionaires: aggrieved sports fans. Why not take a break from complaining that billionaires don’t pay their fair share of income taxes to focus instead on team owners’ obsession with avoiding the luxury tax by trading away their best players?
~ Nathaniel Frum via The Atlantic
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It’s jarring to think that our age—unlike our height or weight—can’t be precisely measured. One can count the rings on a tree to calculate how many years it was alive, but there’s no equivalent marker in humans. Every so often, in the hospital where I work, I notice that a patient has a listed age of more than a hundred and twenty. This is disorienting until I realize that the patient may have come into the hospital with no I.D. and no known contacts, and that they might be suffering from a condition—dementia, schizophrenia—that makes it hard for them to remember who they are, let alone how old. In such cases, the hospital’s computer system defaults to a birth year of 1900.
~ Dhruv Khullar via The New Yorker
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Roy Cohn loved to surround himself with attractive straight men.
~ Robert S. Cohen via The New Yorker
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More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.
~ Walter J. Ong via The Atlantic
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Before I publish this letter, I retype the whole thing from start to finish. It means I take the draft that lives in my Notes app on the left half of my screen while I retype the whole thing into the Google Docs on the right side of my screen. It’s a final check to catch infelicities. More importantly, by simulating the experience of a reader, it’s another way to see if the whole essay stands together.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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In trying to construct a society that maximized talent, James Conant and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era: Intelligence, that highest human trait, can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school from ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society’s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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The danger isn’t just that doomsday thinking will be vindicated, but that expectation and outcome aren’t as separate as they look. A country braced for a collapse has a way of producing one. If you truly believe the system is doomed, why invest in institutions, compromise, or long‑term projects? Why not max out the credit, literal and moral, and enjoy the ride down?
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.
~ Marcel Duchamp
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The universe is computing its own destiny.
~ James Gleick
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