Brian Sholis

* “It’s lack of awareness to lossiness that dooms most conversations to miscommunication, not the lossiness itself.”

- “We undertake activities that we know to be difficult or unpleasant because we see them as part of a good life and wish to think back upon them in the future. We curate our presents to furnish our futures with the right kinds of pasts.”

- "In charting what is relevant at a given moment, bringing new art and cultural developments to our readers’ attention, we aren’t just embracing topicality for topicality’s sake; we’re trying to stay unsettled."

- “In short, it’s the irreversible rise of entropy that makes timekeeping possible, while both periodicity and complexity enhance clock performance.”

A profile of David Mills, an engineer who coded the Network Time Protocol that runs much of the internet. His methods, his code, are slowly be replaced by other ways of measuring and coordinating time, and this story does a good job of framing the personalities of those involved, the trade-offs, etc.

- “[Meghan] Sullivan is mainly concerned with how we relate to time as individuals, and she thinks that many of us do it poorly, because we are “time-biased”—we have unwarranted preferences about when events should happen.”

- "What could be more worthy, and rewarding, I think, than to give over the second half of life to the recovery of the first?"

- “In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think.”

- "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