Brian Sholis

- "Criticism in the broadest sense is a key tactic for maintaining a nonrigid, noncomplacent orientation toward the world. [...] Never get too comfortable, never be quite congruent with yourself, and never assume anything else is entirely congruent with itself."

- “Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future.”

"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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- “Textual interfaces make automation trivial, and automation tools much easier to build.”

- "To exist on platforms is to be subject to this kind of continual identity reconstitution, to fluidity. Self-branding attempts to hide this inevitability by claiming agency over it, as though by choosing to turn our identity into capital, it becomes a free choice. Self-obfuscation, on the other hand, effectively embraces it through a kind of... See more

- "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

- “But if a college like Swarthmore is necessarily and essentially complicit in injustice, its faculty are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window-dressing.”

- "The idea that the right to listen to one another should be defended in a democracy seems strange. That’s probably because we lack a shared vocabulary or framework for understanding listening as a political act ."