Brian Sholis

- "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

- “The first thing to note is that pretty much everything is a clock. Garbage announces the days with its worsening smell. Wrinkles mark the years. “You could tell time by measuring how cold your coffee has gotten on your coffee table,” said Huber, who is now at the Technical University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum... See more

- “There were different types of people at Oxford, no doubt, but what they had in common was that they were all part of a nascent elite. Elite colleges produce elites. Sociologically speaking, that is their function.”

- “When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything... See more

* “I take extra care to prioritize extended time with friends. If you want a deep conversation, you need time. Instead of spending two or three hours with somebody, I prefer to spend two or three days with them.”

- “Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future.”

"I function like a more curated but less efficient version of GPT. My sentences are not generated by A.I., but they are largely the synthesis of my favorite authors."

I enjoy reading human writing because I like getting mad at people. Perhaps the personal quality in writing is a happy accident, and a lot of journalism could be replaced with an

... See more