Brian Sholis

- “But if a college like Swarthmore is necessarily and essentially complicit in injustice, its faculty are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window-dressing.”

* “What changes your life is your peers… The people you rise up with. They’re your power base. Not the person who’s already done it.”

- "Pater said beauty is impossible without some element of strangeness; the potential for beauty was built into his own “strange webs” of significance, spun in such writerly fashion around the object with which he was in dialogue. Criticism is one way to be the spider, paying out silk, both navigating and creating the web as one goes. What defines... See more

- “But the ambiguous quality of the analog is a strength. I could be a minute early or late, depending on my head-tilt. A visual demonstration of relativity. The digital numerals on your phone: That is time controlling you. On the analog, I’m my own boss.”

- “Modern software workflows cross application and service boundaries all the time. Textual interfaces provide an enforceable, rigorous contract between services and applications that can act as the interfaces for apps to integrate with external services, in a way that visual interfaces can’t.”

- "conscious self-branding — an exhausting obligation for many under current labor market conditions — is in tension with its underlying structure of ubiquitous surveillance: how strategically one chooses to present oneself now inescapably occurs within this unchosen context of being tracked and documented and predicted. The efforts made to avoid... See more

A humane and mind-opening look at people's creativity, paired with a trenchant call for others—and the systems we all create—to recognize it and support them. “The failure to see disabled people as creative, collective forces worthy of our attention means that they’re left to make life work in a way that’s mostly invisible. Recognizing the... See more

- "Squashed evaluations: When an entire rich form of activity gets evaluated through one tiny window, then the importance of whatever’s in-frame gets over-exaggerated — and whatever’s outside of that frame gets swamped."