Brian Sholis

Using the enforced idleness that comes after major surgery, Sven Birkerts meditates on how time contracts and dilates and what that means for a sense of self.

- "The speed of the Earth’s rotation is affected by a variety of atmospheric and geologic factors, including the behavior of the planet’s inner layers; the reshaping of its crust, such as through the growth of mountains or bodies of magma; and the friction of the ocean’s tides against the seafloor. The aggregate effect of these forces has... See more

- "An expansive brand accepts a place in society as a type of public good, operating with a simple logic of forever expanding to nourish its every cultural touchpoint."

"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

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- “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

- “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.”

* "[Writing] should feel like work rather than labor."