Brian Sholis

- "The aggregate carbon footprint of Shopify’s fragmented conglomerate of small internet businesses on the other hand, is massive. Each product line houses an inefficient, dysfunctional (mini) supply chain, involving extra transport steps, re-boxing and temporary warehousing, drastically increasing CO2 emissions (and baseline cost) when compared to... See more

- “What is our role in the world? To what extent is our institution a vehicle for political progress as opposed to academic excellence? Rational decision-making is impossible if these questions are left hanging, but at the same time it’s not hard to see why nobody tries to resolve them.”

- “We undertake activities that we know to be difficult or unpleasant because we see them as part of a good life and wish to think back upon them in the future. We curate our presents to furnish our futures with the right kinds of pasts.”

- “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

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

* “What would it mean for the workplace to be, not a family, but ground for making kin? Where and to whom would that kinship’s lines connect and disconnect, and so what? Oddkin doesn’t abide a hierarchy, it doesn’t heed the chain of command. A kinship of oddkin must be rooted in equity and care, in sustainability, in mutual aid. In solidarity.”

- “The way we talk about relevance suggests that it is a quality a work possesses, something an author has engineered or achieved, an accomplishment. This, too, seems wrong to me. Relevance may have more to do with the audience; it is a quality of our reading at least as much as an attribute of what we read.”