Bhargav Varshney

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 betwee

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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 broke... See more

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 pers... See more

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.

Music has no purpose, it merely brings together people’s dreams, fragilities, licentiousness and weirdness. It can bring masses of people together through that. As much as those in the underground find each other, so do the Swifties and The ARMY. Scale, here, doesn’t stop the human capacity of bonding through music and the exchange of identity.

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