Brian Sholis

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

- “One characteristic of a desirable elite, it seems to me, is that its members be self-aware.”

- "The layers of the night are in fact the layers of the self; they offer the most random unfolding of the accumulations of experience—everything that happened and mattered and lapsed away as the next new thing claimed the attention. There is no way to guess what will suddenly surface in those hours. At times I need only to call to mind a specific... See more

- "What could be more worthy, and rewarding, I think, than to give over the second half of life to the recovery of the first?"

* “What changes your life is your peers… The people you rise up with. They’re your power base. Not the person who’s already done it.”

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.

"Any maximizing, economistic approach to living becomes a kind of hoarding as the means and ends reverse and it tips over into irrationality. It’s hoarding when I keep opening tabs, when I try to get to the end of my RSS article queue, when I use iTunes play counts to organize my listening habits, when I buy books I won’t live to read, when all... See more