Bhargav Varshney

With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that

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I’m convinced that it’s going to become a straightforwardly high-status, elite play to renounce phones, social media, and many other aspects of digital culture. In a world of insane information abundance and always-on connection, reclaiming the stillness of your own mind will be akin to flying private.

If I’m right, we’ll see a growing divide

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Steve Jobs energy transference was so strong it was labelled a Reality Distortion Field. He could bend other people's perception of reality with one interaction. I don't think this is some mystical woo-woo energy. It's a combination of intensity, frame, belief, body language, optimism and vocal tonality.

The seeking was passive, the reward pale, the sense of agency bled dry. I checked reflexively, without intention.

write a memoir that was “defiantly self-incriminating”—and the result was a messy jumble of conflicting impulses, part provocation, part self-critique. Western readers rode roughshod over this paradox and made of Chua a kind of Asian minstrel figure. But more than anything else, Battle Hymn is a very American project—one no traditional Chinese... See more

We thought we were just having fun times with devices; it turns out we were spreading nuclear waste over the entire surface of the earth. Piling up heaps of radioactive slag inside our homes. Smearing it over our faces at night. And then a generation was born into that poisoned world; we got to watch them take shape, and it became obvious how... See more