if new college had an “ideological bubble” it was iconoclasm, a perhaps too-little-examined gusto for piercing ideological bubbles.

the great thing about having an open point of view is that it creates an incentive to bend over backwards to present alternative and opposing views, in ways proponents of those views would recognize and endorse, in order to neutralize accusations of unfairness and propaganda.

if you want to get shit done, rather than a “strong man”, instead of autocracy, have you considered a democratically elected unicameral legislature which directly appoints and can remove the executive?

the fraction of communication we experience — across all media, excluding what is explicitly fiction — that is in one form or another a lie is extraordinary.

🫩

so much of civilization is keeping one’s vexations to oneself.

“Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas!” is just over the top with menace.

apartments don’t have to be small.

nowadays if you’re naughty he just farts into it because natural gas is cleaner.

we should drone-show Santa’s sleigh flying around Christmas eve in order to more thoroughly and marvelously mislead the children.

since AI is going to solve all the medical miracles now, we can dispense with the exorbitant patent rents, right?

“…stop framing our approach to China in terms of why it can’t last, what must go wrong, or when the contradictions will finally catch up with it. The system has worked. It has delivered. Waiting for its collapse is not a strategy; it’s a coping mechanism.” jiwankshetry.substack.com/p/must-read-...

it’s all down to the chicken tax. 🐔

“Practically every elite institution selects for people like this now.” @ryanlcooper.com

“Stop asking whether Weiss is good at journalism. She is good at the job she’s actually doing: performing submission to power and recruiting others to the ritual. In today’s media oligopoly, that job pays.”

“If I die and can look back and think ‘yeah, I more or less enjoyed a lot of that and helped more people than I hurt’ then I’ll consider my life a success no matter the scale or the stage.” @ianwelsh.bsky.social www.ianwelsh.net/what-constit...

“the financial system should be designed to put small firms in an environment where they can build credit histories and demonstrate their ability to handle debt – and where they don’t need to rely on collateral to get started.” @csissoko.bsky.social syntheticassets.wordpress.com/2025/12/22/i...

you can never find scissors. not when you need them. never. so you end up buying another pair. until you move. then they all appear, come out of the woodwork, hundreds of them, snapping at you.

what would Andy Rooney say?