Brian Sholis
@briansholis
Brian Sholis
* “There was no “winning” this war; every act of defense and every show of loyalty served to keep the fight alive. This explains the curious fact that for all the fighting people do against cancellation, no cancelee ever vanquishes her cancelers.”
New York Times • Opinion | If I Get Canceled, Let Them Eat Me Alive (Published 2022)
"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 moreJay Caspian Kang • What’s the Point of Reading Writing by Humans?
- "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
Emma Stamm • Who Can It Be Now — Real Life
2019 profile of Wendell Berry by Amanda Petrusich.
Archive-friendly link: https://archive.is/wMaf1
WB: “The thing that worries me very much is how much language we’re using now that is so abstract as to require no thought at all. I mean very important words. Justice, for instance. I had a list, I think, of eleven kinds of justice. Restorative justice, climate justice, economic justice, social justice, and so on. The historian John Lukacs, whose work I greatly respect, said that “the indiscriminate pursuit of justice . . . may lay the world to waste.” And he invoked modern war, which kills indiscriminately for the sake of some “justice.” He thought the pursuit of truth, small “t,” much safer. I want to remember—and this comes to me from my dad, to some extent—that our system of justice requires a finding of truth, and it labors to see that justice is never done by one person.”
WB: “Once you accept that something or somebody is exploitable, there’s another limitlessness. Exploitation leads, with perfect logic, to exhaustion. And our ways of land use exploit both land and people.”
WB: “You must either decide this is worth working at, or just leave it undone. Marriage is not perfect agreement. But you’ve accepted this other person into your mind. I work alone, but always with her presence in my mind. And she is somebody I want to impress. I’m going to write this with the hope that it’ll help her to love me. I feel the stakes are pretty high. I’m in a conversation with her that hasn’t ended yet.”
WB; “Our dominant practice now is to solve problems with other problems.”
WB: “You can’t think about the issues we’re talking about without finally having to talk about mystery. You’ll finally have to talk about the commitment that doesn’t see any end. That’s a life that you are not going to be able to prescribe, that finally you’re not in charge of.”
- "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."
Hugh Francis • ✨ Expansive Brands • garden3d research
* “Like a marriage, the best friendships require investment, compromise, and sacrifice. By creating shared alignment, trust, and companionship, strong friendships nourish the soul and sharpen the mind.”
David Perell • The Fruits of Friendship - David Perell
* “The 10 Club is a group of 10 people you want to work with later in life, and every member should be kind, ambitious, and generous.”
David Perell • The Fruits of Friendship - David Perell
- “In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think.”