Instagram creates a disarming sense of intimacy with people you’ve never met.
~ Jacob Mikanowski
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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
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The ground that unites the powerless against the powerful is always about to collapse. Our irrepressible red-blue conflict is always ready to set Americans against Americans in every conceivable way: education, race, religion, age, gender, region, even views of foreign wars. It’s better to be honest about these differences, and try not to rub them raw until they destroy the chance for a better country, than to assume that they don’t matter or wish them out of existence.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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European universities have failed to build substantial endowments, so their revenues are dependent on the taxpaying public, which also must support a million other initiatives.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Being smart doesn’t mean that you’re willing to try on alternative viewpoints, or that you’re comfortable with uncertainty, or that you can recognize your own mistakes. It doesn’t mean you have insight into your own biases.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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I learned a lot from architecture.
~ Dieter Rams
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I don’t remember the first time I heard this story, but I do know where I was when I committed it to memory. As a Mormon teenager in suburban Massachusetts, I woke up every morning at 5:30 to attend a “seminary” class held in the bishop’s basement. This was no mark of special devotion on my part; all the Mormon kids were expected to be there, and so all the Mormon kids were, Mormonism being a religion that prizes showing up
~ McKay Coppins via The Atlantic
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At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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It was after he had a child and a mortgage, he said, that he dug into producing sync music. The work was steady, the licensing fees could provide a middle-class life and the market was so robust that it seemed to dwarf everything else you might think of as music.
~ Ryan Francis Bradley via The New York Times Magazine
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It’s easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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The church that Joseph Smith set about building was almost achingly American. He held up the Constitution as a quasi-canonical work of providence. He published a new sacred text, the Book of Mormon, that centered on Jesus visiting the ancient Americas. He even taught that God had brought about the American Revolution so that his Church could be restored in a free country—thus linking Mormonism’s success to that of the American experiment. And yet, almost as soon as Smith started attracting converts, they were derided as un-American.
~ McKay Coppins via The Atlantic
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