“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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Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote
Quote, Unquote
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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Quote, Unquote
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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In October 2025, Beijing significantly expanded its export controls on rare earths and for the first time publicly asserted extraterritorial jurisdiction, requiring foreign exporters to obtain Chinese government approval to export items containing even trace amounts of Chinese-origin rare earths, including goods manufactured entirely outside China.38 Those controls have since been partially suspended following bilateral negotiations, but the architecture remains in place and can be reactivated. Apple’s iPhones contain dysprosium in their vibration motors and a range of other rare earth elements in their displays and speakers. Moving the final assembly out of China does nothing to address that dependency.
~ Isaac Stone Fish via American Affairs
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In the realm of sports talk, kindness is unrelatable; it’s alien, even. What’s relatable is irrationally caring for your team and irrationally hating its rivals—not pandering by saying that you happen to like all of the teams in key Rust Belt swing states.
~ Nathaniel Frum via The Atlantic
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Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
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