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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Coverage of Silicon Valley increasingly reminds me of coverage of China, where a legacy media reporter might parachute in, write a dispatch on something that looks deranged, and leave without moving past caricature.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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Upon reflection, it makes sense that the British are reading Breakneck and Abundance. Every problem in the lawyerly society is worse in the UK. I thought that California’s high-speed rail project was an embarrassment; then I learned about the Leeds tram network.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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Silicon Valley often speaks in strange tongues, starting podcasts and shows that are popular within the tech world but do not travel far beyond the Bay Area. Though San Francisco has produced so much wealth, it is a relative underperformer in the national culture.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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There’s more to the Bay Area than unusual health practices. It is, after all, a place that creates not only new products, but also new modes of living.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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An author spends so much time workshopping words and sentences. I accept that a book’s reception is subject to the vagaries of the market and the memelords.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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For all the American complaints about home affordability, relative housing costs can be even worse in big European cities. London has the house prices of California and the income levels of Mississippi.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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It’s unfortunate that any show or movie made about Silicon Valley is full of awkward nerds; by contrast, Hollywood reliably finds attractive leads when it makes movies about Wall Street. So long as the tech world is talking about the Machine God and the Antichrist, so long as it declines to read more broadly, so long as it is mostly inward looking, it will continue to alienate big parts of the world.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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While I feel apprehensive about the US, I am much more gloomy about Europe. I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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