Sriya Sridhar

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and... See more

Society which scorns excellence in plumbing because it’s a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy.

Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

~ John W. Gardner,

In some corners of the Internet there’s a fascination with traditionalism, and criticism of the ways the openness and optionality of modernity have left people feeling lost. I’ve always felt like, look, I could never be a traditionalist, because I don’t want to give birth to five kids without anesthesia and spend half of my day cleaning up around... See more

Scrolling displaces observation, shuts out occasions for self-generated thought, silences out-of-the-blue invitations. Checking the phone reroutes the discomfort of blankness and emptiness. It stoppers authentic—often anxious—waiting. And, even more disturbing, scrolling narrows the field of my curiosity.

The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.

René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure