Brian Sholis
@briansholis
Brian Sholis
* “The most impactful mitigation strategy is to accept that lossiness exists.”
Mandy Brown • All communication is lossy
2019 profile of Wendell Berry by Amanda Petrusich.
Archive-friendly link: https://archive.is/wMaf1
WB: “The thing that worries me very much is how much language we’re using now that is so abstract as to require no thought at all. I mean very important words. Justice, for instance. I had a list, I think, of eleven kinds of justice. Restorative justice, climate justice, economic justice, social justice, and so on. The historian John Lukacs, whose work I greatly respect, said that “the indiscriminate pursuit of justice . . . may lay the world to waste.” And he invoked modern war, which kills indiscriminately for the sake of some “justice.” He thought the pursuit of truth, small “t,” much safer. I want to remember—and this comes to me from my dad, to some extent—that our system of justice requires a finding of truth, and it labors to see that justice is never done by one person.”
WB: “Once you accept that something or somebody is exploitable, there’s another limitlessness. Exploitation leads, with perfect logic, to exhaustion. And our ways of land use exploit both land and people.”
WB: “You must either decide this is worth working at, or just leave it undone. Marriage is not perfect agreement. But you’ve accepted this other person into your mind. I work alone, but always with her presence in my mind. And she is somebody I want to impress. I’m going to write this with the hope that it’ll help her to love me. I feel the stakes are pretty high. I’m in a conversation with her that hasn’t ended yet.”
WB; “Our dominant practice now is to solve problems with other problems.”
WB: “You can’t think about the issues we’re talking about without finally having to talk about mystery. You’ll finally have to talk about the commitment that doesn’t see any end. That’s a life that you are not going to be able to prescribe, that finally you’re not in charge of.”
- “In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think.”
The Point • Elite Education | The Point Magazine
- "Rather than applying the traditional object oriented approach of wrapping a consumer around a product; instead by identifying every opportunity to establish a brand as a cultural institution (that serves the public in it’s operation), the brand consistently fortifies an ethical and moral foundation from which to exist."
Hugh Francis • ✨ Expansive Brands • garden3d research
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.
Emma Stamm • Who Can It Be Now — Real Life
* "Sometimes, to be a resident of polite society, you have to lie, and this feels unpleasant for a moment but is usually bearable. But lying to an empty page alone in a room feels awful."
Sasha Chapin • If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying
- “In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.”
The Point • Elite Education | The Point Magazine
- "What could be more worthy, and rewarding, I think, than to give over the second half of life to the recovery of the first?"