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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Some writers work like sculptors: they produce something fully chiseled that could stand forever. Novelists tend to be like that. Rather than being a sculptor, I see myself as being a musician. After a performance, no matter how it goes, the musician’s task is to start practicing for the next one.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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An American academic who wants to move to Europe would have to accept more teaching and administrative work, lose tenure, and for the pleasure of all that, probably halve her pay. She would likely also suffer the resentment of European peers, who scoff at the idea that better paid Americans are now refugees. Trump threw a lot against US universities; they are holding up okay, and I think they will remain strong.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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What the Novo Nordisk news made me appreciate was that American companies are comprehensively outworking their European counterparts in biotech in addition to software and finance. Europe is losing the two-front battle against the Chinese on manufacturing and the Americans on services.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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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
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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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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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