Amanda Askell, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy, was the only person I met at Anthropic who dressed the part of a vintage cyberpunk, with cropped platinum hair and asymmetric black ensembles. She supervises what she describes as Claude’s “soul.”
~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker
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Robert Mapplethorpe, a student of photographic history, wasn’t conferring dignity on a taboo subculture; he was after great photographs, although he understood that one of the things that can make a photograph great is the charge of the forbidden. What unified his work, across subjects, was what the French call le glacis de la lumière — a polished, technically exacting finish.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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Europeans are right to gloat they are not under the rule of Trump. But for all of Trump’s ills, I see him as a sign of the underlying dynamism of the US. Who else would have elected so whimsical a leader to this high office? Trump forces questions that Europeans have no appetite to confront, proud as they are in being superior to both Americans and Chinese.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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“Piss Christ” may also nod to Gauguin’s “The Yellow Christ.” Andres Serrano first tried his wife’s urine, then switched to his own, judging it yellower.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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Today’s music is treated like a free-flowing utility: It’s added to spaces the way air-conditioning is, providing the right vibe for TV shows, YouTube tutorials, stores, study sessions. That means many of today’s musicians, instead of selling records, operate more like the people who once played the piano in department-store lobbies, the organ at baseball games or the accordion in 19th-century cafes: Their job is to provide the appropriate background noise for some other experience.
~ Ryan Francis Bradley via The New York Times Magazine
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A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.)
~ Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic
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Many people, particularly in the academic and journalistic circles, think of Donald Trump as a political revolutionary. I see him much more as a rhetorical revolutionary.
~ Roderick Hart via The Atlantic
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In 2010, on Respect for the Aged Day, Japanese officials sought out a Tokyo man named Sogen Kato to congratulate him on living to a hundred and eleven. Instead, they found a mummified corpse in his bedroom. Kato had been dead for three decades, and his family had fraudulently collected more than a hundred thousand dollars in pension money. A government investigation later revealed that hundreds of thousands of “living” residents of Japan had in fact gone missing or died, including eighty per cent of Japanese centenarians.
~ Dhruv Khullar via The New Yorker
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The two most insular cities I’ve lived in are San Francisco and Beijing. They are places where people are willing to risk apocalypse every day in order to reach utopia. Though Beijing is open only to a narrow slice of newcomers — the young, smart, and Han — its elites must think about the rest of the country and the rest of the world. San Francisco is more open, but when people move there, they stop thinking about the world at large.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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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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