Just as God shaped man in his own image from clay, Europe was to be shaped by the United States according to its will. Immersion in consumer society was not enough; the same logic demanded the penetration not only of households and groceries with American wares but of people’s minds with American ideas and norms.
~ Baptiste Detombe via American Affairs
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What determines a society’s health is not the existence of an elite, but the effectiveness of the elite, and whether the relationship between the elites and everybody else is mutually respectful.
~ David Brooks via The Atlantic
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Artificial Intelligence won’t replace all entry-level white-collar jobs, but it will cause an extended period of pain, during which an increasing number of employers, wowed by new advances in technology, decide to quietly stop hiring many recent college graduates. This will accelerate the already widening unemployment gap between young, college-educated people and everyone else.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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New York Mayor Ed Koch was annoyed, and he later referred to Donald Trump as “piggy, piggy, piggy.” In return, Trump called him a moron. The Mayor, he said, was “extremely nasty, mean-spirited, and very vicious, an extremely disloyal human being.”
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker
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Now we have a special box of electricity that turns Reddit comments and old toaster manuals into cogent conversations about Shakespeare and molecular biology. The sheer competence of language models has already revamped the human quest for self-knowledge.
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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Youth sentiment is a notoriously hard thing to track. Polling is a fraught enough enterprise without having to deal with flaky kids, occasionally impenetrable survey questions, and the real possibility that words such as “confidence” or “satisfied” might not mean the same thing from one generation to the next.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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I submit that Europeans ought to be more circumspect in their self-satisfaction. Chaos is only one election away. Right-populist parties are outpolling ruling incumbent parties pretty much everywhere, and it is as likely as not that Trumps with European characteristics will engulf the continent by the end of the decade.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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“Piss Christ” isn’t the most sophisticated art work ever made. But it was made by an artist, for artistic reasons.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
“Anecdotally, it appears that the rapid adoption of AI may already be affecting student well-being and creating new long-term challenges. Some students are becoming dependent on AI for schoolwork or emotional support; losing their sense of agency, purpose, and confidence; and worrying about their career prospects in an AI-saturated world. Instructors and other academic staff should be prepared to recognize AI-related academic, social, and emotional challenges and to direct students to appropriate support.”
Published on August 13, 2026.
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People who have worked in both China and Silicon Valley tend to comment on the similarities: the belief in rapid change, the power of engineers, the odes to humanity that mask impatience with actual humans.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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