Brian Sholis

- “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.”

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.

* “When you get on a plane and travel you go 15 heartbeats per mile. That is, in the time it takes to travel a mile in flight your heart beats 15 times. On a train your heart might beat 250 times per mile. And we count this up and we make sense of it. We’re constantly switching accelerations; we’re jumping between time frames. That’s what we’re... See more

* “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.”

- "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

* “It’s lack of awareness to lossiness that dooms most conversations to miscommunication, not the lossiness itself.”

- “… 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.”

"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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