Brian Sholis

- "the concrete practices of the tech industry now structure identity and individuality in ways that support its own hegemony. While it presents endless avenues for expression, it sees us as wholly reducible to market logic, where we are real to the degree that our consumption habits are rational. This vision of selfhood promotes uniformity and... 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.”

- "The decision to **add to cart** is no longer a knee-jerk reaction mid-scroll on social media, but now a risky energetic investment by an increasingly cynical and burnt-out online user."

- "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

- “… why are we seeing a resurgence in this trend now? I think the easiest factor we can identify is that more people entering the workforce are unafraid of textual interfaces, because they’ve been typing and messaging and tagging their friends online all their life.”

- “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.”

* “All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.”

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