Brian Sholis

* "And if you can’t even type it—forget about publishing it, we’re just talking about the initial keyboard action—that means that you don’t want to know yourself."

- "… the history of thought about free speech does contain ideas that can be of use. Among them are the concepts of “audience interests” and the “right to hear,” which have been repeatedly recognized by the Supreme Court. These concepts see the First Amendment from a listener’s point of view. In addition to asking, “Do I have the right to speak,”... See more

- “If one function of a college like Swarthmore should be to create a good elite, another should be to give young people a taste for the life of the mind understood as an end in itself.”

* “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.”

- "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."

- “My discomfort with our current use of “relevance” as a term of judgment is that it conceals its criteria, and that those criteria are not aesthetic, but social and political. I worry that if we make such “relevance” not just one among other judgments we might make about art, but a condition of our interest, we have made that condition purely... See more