flâneur

Jack Li

2 followers · 7 following · 1192 views

on the atlas — 127

highlights — 392

  • That either they have failed feminism, or feminism has failed them.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • It would be pathetic now to keep seeing those friends. Maintaining friendships costs his female and agender friends nothing, but it costs him a daily toll of endless triggering, which they’ve never once acknowledged.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • Maybe it’s like you never really grappled with this shit because you thought you were exempt. But you refuse to change and are shocked when nothing changes.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • Being a thirtysomething, he feels too young to give up and too old to adapt.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • Dating online, he realizes, one has to choose either fraudulence or honesty that can’t compete with fraudulence.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • Of course he knows that, he replies, but it’s important to him, especially as a privileged white man, to avoid placing the burden of educating him about women’s experiences on a woman,
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • he understands they mean the patriarchy and not him specifically—but why’d she say that with him standing right there, unless he didn’t count as a man?
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • He cultivates academic achievement, surmising that income and status and intellect will enhance his appeal. And they do, but not for him: the same standards prevail in his field as everywhere else.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • He figures that even bad relationships are better than none, since they prepare you for future relationships, and heartbreak is romantic and dignified, whereas rejection just makes you a loser.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • By persuading him to reject himself, was she just offloading her guilt? He stews at the familiarity of the situation: once again, he’s got to be the one who accepts, forgives, tolerates, pretends not to be wounded, pretends he has stopped hoping—all this sapping emotional labor not just to preserve his dignity and assuage her guilt, but also because he doesn’t want to spoil his chances of dating her in the future, since it’s her prerogative, after all, to change her mind.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • Still, the school ingrained in him, if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • IF YOU ASK HIM WHERE he went to high school, he likes to boast that, actually, he went to an all-girls school. That was sort of true—he was one of five males at a progressive private school that had gone co-ed just before he’d enrolled.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • Even in the case of railroads—and in the case of many new technologies—speculative investment frenzies often lead to high rates of capital incineration. The Engines that Moves Markets is one of the best textbooks on technology investing, and the major takeaway—indeed, focused on railroads—is that a lot of people lose a lot of money during speculative technology waves. It’s hard to pick winners, but much easier to pick losers (canals, in the case of railroads).
    AI’s $600B Question | Sequoia Capital
  • God, you’re frightfully stubborn. Everyone tells you so! You like problems you can’t solve. You know some feelings are inarticulable but still you keep trying and trying to convey your experience. You’re deeply romantic but wrap it in rationality. You’re soulful, headstrong. You’re mostly playful and only a little serious. What you know is what you’ve always known: who you’ve been is who you’ll never be again.
    who you are - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • Lately you believe that to love someone is to be irrevocably changed by them, to carry a small piece with you forever
    who you are - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • Nowadays you don’t fixate anymore on the pulse of what could’ve been, for the weeds you had to pull out, for the distance and space and light and time. Forward motion is comforting. It’s sorrowful too, because so many parts get reconfigured. Past selves get left behind.
    who you are - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • Your emotions, by and large, are not a problem to be fixed in service of producing a better, more manageable, more loveable self. They just want to be felt.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • But to extrapolate that reality into the idea that we shouldn’t want to tend to our loved ones, to receive them as flawed and imperfect people and care for them anyway, is a grave miscorrection. We all exist to save each other. There is barely anything else worth living for.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • Welcome to the ideal relationship: one between two perfectly realized individuals who would be totally fine alone but choose to hang out because they like splitting rent and watching Law and Order. No passion, no growth, no difficult conversations — that’s your therapist’s job.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • One of the most remarkable pleasures that love has to offer, in fact, is the feeling of meeting someone who is scarred and beat-up and bruised, too emotional or not emotional enough or oscillating wildly between the two, and offering to love them enough to help them get better (and, of course, to have them do the same to you). To grow beside a friend or lover, knowing that you will poke and prod at each other as you take shape but unafraid of the resulting scar tissue — this is the good stuff
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • There is one way to reject this: make the choice to love someone who is as flawed as you are.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • When we insist that we could only ever effectively love someone who’s been perfectly “healed” — who will not struggle, accidentally hurt us, trigger us, say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, or participate in any other uncomfortable display of humanity — we are reinforcing, and perhaps projecting, our own beliefs that we have to be perfect in order to be loved
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • I am troubled by its implication: it insists that healing is a mountain to be climbed alone, and that relationships are the reward we get once we’ve reached the summit.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • I look back at the person I was at eighteen and I hardly recognize her, which feels like a miracle and a tragedy all at once. Standing between me and my younger self are a thousand different individual experiences of failure and growth and redemption, each a moment of excruciating vulnerability being witnessed by the very people I wish could only see me at my best. It’s driven me to isolate myself, convinced that ritualistic self-punishment and pathetic martyrdom were the only ways I could ever make myself worthy of other people. I realized, though, that I was being a coward. Being alone is ha…
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • Most damning of all, they are both infected by the same rotten premise: that it is possible, even ideal, to get better by yourself.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • You sit in your room and tell yourself lies: that they don’t want to hear from you anyway; that you’ll wait here alone writing Notes app soliloquies until you become good enough to deserve other people; that it is a noble endeavour to punish yourself.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • Persinette writes that these e-therapists have turned healing into “a religion, a lifestyle, and above all, a brand” while promoting a culture of isolation and individual optimization. In this ecosystem, “...therapy has become a litmus test for social belonging and inherent goodness, a sign that one is aware of and has adapted to the newest standards of how to behave.”
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • The best thing about tripods, I’ve heard, is that they can’t hurt your feelings.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • It glamourizes — and moralizes — a life spent alone.
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together.
    if we weren't meant to dance, then why all this music?
  • The truth is that the meritocracy was never more than partial. Visit any elite campus across our great nation, and you can thrill to the heart-warming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. Kids at schools like Stanford think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan, or if one plays the cello and the other lacrosse. Never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers.
    Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic
  • It’s considered glamorous to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker.
    Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic
  • To be a high-achieving student is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a future leader of society. But what these institutions mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top.
    Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic
  • Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms
    Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic
  • So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.
    Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic
  • the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood
    Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic
  • Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
    Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic
  • The college admissions game is not primarily about the lower and middle classes seeking to rise, or even about the upper-middle class attempting to maintain its position. It is about determining the exact hierarchy of status within the upper-middle class itself. In the affluent suburbs and well-heeled urban enclaves where this game is principally played, it is not about whether you go to an elite school. It’s about which one you go to. It is Penn versus Tufts, not Penn versus Penn State. It doesn’t matter that a bright young person can go to Ohio State, become a doctor, settle in Dayton, and m…
    Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic
  • It seems obvious when I say it, but I had somehow overlooked how much capitalism was inextricably tied with colonialism.
    south africa - by Cece Xie - debrief
  • When I asked a guide whether he considered the United States to be a colonizer, he said, “Of course. America is like the Frankenstein’s monster of Europe. Coming in with their KFCs and McDonald’s where the marketplaces used to be.”
    south africa - by Cece Xie - debrief
  • As these activists infiltrate our institutions and actively tear down any semblance of status gated by wealth, they take over and strive to achieve the same position and status in society. Yet they have contributed little to society and therefore rule with fear, not respect.
    Don't Eat the Rich
  • Elite institutions are dead. Private societies are in decay. They are being replaced by other exclusive societies that are elected on identity politics. Elitism in the traditional sense used to go hand in hand with wealth, but it no longer does.
    Don't Eat the Rich
  • They complain about not being able to afford going out to dinner, but they basically live at the package center with all the online shopping orders they have to pick up.
    Don't Eat the Rich
  • Legacy sorority girls Zillow people’s houses to gossip about their parents’ net worth.
    Don't Eat the Rich
  • This anti-elitism isn’t real. When they can benefit from elitism, they embrace it.
    Don't Eat the Rich
  • The same students who are vocal about such things are the very ones who want to make as much money as possible and obsess over starting salaries
    Don't Eat the Rich
  • The habits of the elite are changing from loud luxury to quiet luxury, luxury goods to luxury beliefs, finance guys to tech bros. Nepo babies used to strive for Harvard’s Z-list, now they dream of dropping out of Stanford.
    Don't Eat the Rich
  • the fundamental cause of most human violence is the wish to ward off the feeling of shame and humiliation and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride
    Beneath the Mask of Vulnerable Narcissism
  • Humiliation has been described by researchers as 'the nuclear bomb of the emotions
    Beneath the Mask of Vulnerable Narcissism