Brian Sholis

* "[Writing] should feel like work rather than labor."

- “One major aspect of the mystery of time is the fact that it doesn’t play the same role in quantum mechanics as other quantities, like position or momentum; physicists say there are no “time observables” — no exact, intrinsic time stamps on quantum particles that can be read off by measurements. Instead, time is a smoothly varying parameter in... See more

"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

- “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

- "Even if we’re anonymous or confusing to other people, we remain pellucid and knowable to platforms, which establish a recognizable personal brand of sorts algorithmically. When we encounter ourselves in the guise of recommended content and customized ads, we are meeting our coherent public image, as the platforms have deduced it from an entire... See more

Using the enforced idleness that comes after major surgery, Sven Birkerts meditates on how time contracts and dilates and what that means for a sense of self.

* “You imagine that you are fighting against the mob, but actually you are becoming a part of it. Within the mob there is no justice and no argument and no reasoning, no space for inquiry or investigation. The only good move is not to play.”

- “[Meghan] Sullivan is mainly concerned with how we relate to time as individuals, and she thinks that many of us do it poorly, because we are “time-biased”—we have unwarranted preferences about when events should happen.”