We remember the pandemic as a boiling point in the culture wars. The continuous battles over lockdowns, masking, police violence, expertise, conspiracy theories, and the outcome of the 2020 election have never really subsided. But the pandemic also exposed the grotesque unfairness of our economy and society in deeply personal ways, cutting across the red-blue divide.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
:::
A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker. Developers using A.I. focus on the overall shape of the software, how its features and facets work together. Because the agents can produce functioning code so quickly, their human overseers can experiment, trying things out to see what works and discarding what doesn’t.
~ Clive Thompson via The New York Times
The college-educated are trained to expect that the world will make room for them, and when it doesn’t—when they suffer the indignities of wage work, with its unpredictable schedules and disrespectful bosses, and can see no way up or out—the blow isn’t just economic; it’s psychological.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
:::
Britain’s electrical network is in even worse disrepair than America’s. I am not sure if it is a geopolitical asset to be able to stiff-upper-lip one’s way through ineffectual government. Maybe it’s more of a liability. But my experience of criticizing Brits resembles my experience of criticizing lawyers.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
:::
As Democratic politicians scramble to seem in touch and ensure that their faces appear on our phones as much as possible, they are neglecting the free real estate offered by sports talk.
~ Nathaniel Frum via The Atlantic
:::
The new apocalyptic coalition is a strange one. It includes evangelical Christians waiting for the Rapture, climate activists convinced we have blown past every tipping point, and AI researchers gaming out scenarios where the machine stops taking instructions.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
:::
Calling all transmission of data “speech” is a gross distortion of reality, and a generation of teenagers raised on social media has borne the cost of it.
~ Tim Wu via The New York Times
:::
Apple discloses what it is legally required to disclose, but the gap between what is disclosed and what is materially relevant to investors has widened—and that gap is itself a liability.
~ Isaac Stone Fish via American Affairs
:::
Each of us gets to choose which futures we wish to fight against, which we can live with, and which we will fight for. As you make your choices, I suggest ignoring the din of the death rattle and trying to think with independence. Do not process this with the partisan blinders of 20th century mass politics; one way or another, you are entering a new era of institution building in living color.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional
:::
Though Utah is very conservative, its residents generally don’t romanticize rugged individualism or Darwinian hyper-capitalism. It has the lowest income inequality in the country, and ranks near the top for upward mobility. The relative lack of racial diversity no doubt helps skew these metrics—structural racism doesn’t take the same toll in a state that is 78 percent white. But economists say the tightly networked faith communities have provided a crucial extra layer to the social safety net.
~ McKay Coppins via The Atlantic
:::