Jay Matthews

As these standards became articulated and expressed more clearly, both in briefings to elite high school college admission counselors and in the results of the admissions themselves, ambitious high school students (and their families) learned how to perform them. They wouldn’t seek to be student body president or editor-in-chief of the school... See more

To survive, any society requires moral legitimization. The philosophy of liberal individualism serves to legitimize capitalism because it espouses ideals that suggest that all human rights and needs are respected under its terms. If it were generally recognized that capitalism is a system of dominance and exploitation that requires the enrichment... See more

That is the predicate of the slender, poetic 1993 novel  Einstein's Dreams by physicist Alan Lightman — a book about time and the tricks we play on ourselves to bear our transience, a book that does for time what Alain de Botton’s  The Course of Love does for love: punctuating a fictional world with philosophical quickenings, thought experiments,... See more

"A lot of people no longer do work that has any meaning to them, since humans are productive creatures... we are meant to create. When we do work that is not creative, that doesn't reflect who we are, that imposes depression, anxiety, a sense of meaninglessness. When we have a sense of meaninglessness, we will want to substitute the meaninglessness... See more

We need to understand and accept that this is the psychological reality we are working with —and  we need to embrace the work of changing it for the better

Systems where defects are swept under the rug, or “will be dealt with at the end of the project” inevitably gain that unshakeable perception of being “buggy”, which will harm your digital product, no matter how innovative it is.

What is finally at stake in Futurism’s explosive myth is thus, paradoxically, the power of presence—nostalgic and times, but also ironic and even grotesque— within chaos. For if the dark night of Futurism can be figured alternatively and all at once as anarchism (the destruction of political ideology and artistic convention), nihilism (the... See more

Uses Perez's Technological Surge Cycles, somewhere between financial bubble expanding and persisting before pops.