Brian Sholis

* “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.”

A thoughtful essay about how our online identities—even when our default mode is misdirection or obfuscation—are visible to the platforms we use, and by extension to capitalism and its prerogatives.

- "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."

- "… 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

- “She advocates for temporal neutrality—a habit of mind that gives the past, the present, and the future equal weight.”

- “… a clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes in which energy spreads out among more particles or into a broader area.”

- “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.”

- “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.”