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."

- "Squashed evaluations: When an entire rich form of activity gets evaluated through one tiny window, then the importance of whatever’s in-frame gets over-exaggerated — and whatever’s outside of that frame gets swamped."

- “In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.”

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.

- “If you do stay, then you have to acknowledge that the sociological function of elite colleges in non-ideal America will always be to produce an unfairly privileged elite. The only question is what it means to do this well.”

- "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