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."

- " To defend our right to listen to one another, we must sometimes strain to hear voices that the powerful would drown out. "

"This book traces the history of adult education in America from its roots in the popular tradition of self-improvement, to present day education outside a college or university setting. The author persuasively links developments in the realm of popular self-improvement to cultural and social forces, and explores the reasons why ordinary citizens... 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.”

- “Textual interfaces are everywhere in the modern workplace. Slash-commands in Slack and Discord and Notion, hash-tags for channels and tagging, special syntax for searching and querying data across applications, @-mentions in social media and team work environments, and so on. We’re training ourselves to be more savvy users of the textual... See more

- “If one function of a college like Swarthmore should be to create a good elite, another should be to give young people a taste for the life of the mind understood as an end in itself.”