The United States has a knack of going down in flames and then rejuvenating. China does not.
~ Joerg Wuttke, former head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China via The New Yorker
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
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The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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In some ways, Anthropic’s terms resemble these traditional examples of privately imposed contractual limits on the military’s use of technology. The company’s position on autonomous lethal weapons, for example, is not one of outright opposition to the use of such weapons but instead a judgment that today’s frontier AI systems are not capable enough to autonomously make decisions about human life or death.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
~ Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic
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Roy Cohn was a master of situational immorality. He had rules about how to exercise power. You would always try to goad your enemies into being the worst they possibly could be and then turn that against them, so that Cohn would actually look like the good guy, which he virtually never was.
~ Sam Roberts, city politics reporter for the Daily News via The New Yorker
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For years, China’s rising power has rested on a fragile balance of economic freedom and political control, in what early Party reformers called the “birdcage economy”—airy enough to allow enterprises to thrive, but not capacious enough to sacrifice power. That arrangement has rarely looked more tenuous.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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Call me a romantic, but I believe that there will be a future, and indeed a long future, beyond 2027. History will not end. We need to cultivate the skill of exact thinking in demented times.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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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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