flâneur

Stephen Fay

132 followers · 54 following · 7323 views

on the atlas — 223

highlights — 953

  • He says scientific research is much the same, always fixing broken things without an instruction book.
    Failure in Physics | Society of Physics Students
  • My friend and noted astrophysicist Harvey Moseley grew up on a farm and describes life there as endlessly fixing broken things.
    Failure in Physics | Society of Physics Students
  • I thank my lucky stars every day for (a) my experience of failure with my thesis project and (b) my brilliant colleagues at NASA who knew quite well why we had to test, and didn't give up.
    Failure in Physics | Society of Physics Students
  • we owed it to the taxpayers to get it right and not take chances with their funds.
    Failure in Physics | Society of Physics Students
  • What did I learn? Number one, if you do not test something, it will not work.
    Failure in Physics | Society of Physics Students
  • Except they’re not. It would be one thing if they were happy—but even this is not true. They don’t know what is expected of them, or what they should aspire to be. The lack of expectations creates nihilistic tendencies and existential crises. In 2018, around one quarter of Yale undergraduates said they sought mental health counseling. One quarter of Yale students took the “Happiness and the Good Life” course in 2018 in an attempt to find answers. Students are demanding more mental health resources. A new wellness space was created with bean-bag chairs and colored walls. But the real sources of…
    The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech
  • They effectively become middle class, because there is no longer any socially esteemed notion of upper class. They have a base of power, of f-you money, that they could use to become something greater than just another office worker or businessperson. But there is no script for that, no institutional or ideological support. What would it even mean to be an esteemed, blue-blooded aristocrat in 2019? So they take the easy and safe way.
    The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech
  • You would rather be somebody normal. But not, “normal,” normal. More like normal with options and vacations and money “normal.” Normal but still powerful. Or you want to be something even better than normal. You want to be the underdog. There is always a certain strange sense of pleasure in being an underdog. Expectations are lower. Whenever you accomplish anything at all—it is an accomplishment. You would rather have a narrative story of “coming up from the bottom.” Someone who not only does not have the responsibility of power, but someone who has a right to feel resentful of those who do.
    The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech
  • It is all in the language they understand—polite and clean, because it isn’t really real. It is a performative spectacle about their own morale and guilt.
    The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech
  • But lacking the capacity for an orderly restructuring, or even a diagnosis of problems and needs, we dive deeper into a chaotic ideological mode of coordination that sweeps away the old structures.
    The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech
  • Shouting from the rooftops that “They aren’t doing enough!” is much easier than following any traditional system of elite social norms and duties, let alone carefully re-engineering that system to reestablish order in a time of growing crisis.
    The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech
  • What happens when a school with this position is embarrassed about its role as an international trendsetter? What if instead of doing the hard work to set the tone for responsible rule, it abdicates that responsibility?
    The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech
  • And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise.
    Gin, Television, and Social Surplus · GitHub
  • The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity.
    Gin, Television, and Social Surplus · GitHub
  • I don’t understand why more people aren’t writing them. It’s not just about sharing your thoughts and recommendations with the rest of the world. Having this vessel that you’re motivated to fill encourages being more observant and analytical in daily life too.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Knowledge can compound. I’d like for us to think more about how to accelerate the growth of learning. The traditional method of reading more books and trying to improve professionally are good starts, but it’s not enough to stop there. One can learn more by traveling to new places, being social in different ways, reading new types of books, changing jobs or professions, moving to a new place, by doing better and by doing more.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • What is Twitter anymore? Not the platform for surfacing information-dense articles, but rather mostly shouting and videos.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Americans today already are able to be polarized around any issue, no matter how picayune, so I’m nervous about how much more strangeness the online world is able to produce.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • The main tension I see in America is that while the real world is getting better, the Internet is getting much weirder. That is, mainstream activities (like selling goods to people) are improving, but the online fringes are becoming incomprehensible. One of the questions I ask my SF friends is what the entrepreneurial 20-year-olds are doing these days. Are they starting a billion-dollar company, or are they more interested in becoming a memelord who is trying to incite a movement on the Internet? I’m not sure we’re seeing a surge of exciting startup creation, but we sure are seeing a lot more …
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • A significant (though not unpleasant) culture shock for me is to have to cook most of my meals. On this topic, I’m sad that many people I meet have never been to Asia. I tell them: please try at least to visit Japan or Singapore.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • The disappointment I feel mostly concerns food. You can find pretty good food in America at fairly high prices, but you will never be able to find revelation for the cost of a few dollars — which is the default in Asia.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • The cultural amenities are great and people are having enormous fun there.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • The two cities where I used to spend the most time — New York and San Francisco — are quite different, mostly for the worse. The bulk of my friends in San Francisco have moved away, in large part to New York. There’s some chatter that SF is “back,” but I don’t sense that everyone is enthusiastic to return to one of the most dysfunctional cities in the country.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Chicago’s power projection rested on three things. First, an efficient process that utilized even the marginal bits of the animal — everything except the squeal, the saying went — that local butchers tended to discard. Second, refrigerated railcars and storehouses that were kept cool by blocks of ice carved from nearby rivers and lakes. Third, a ruthless salesforce that cut their prices to the bone to break the reluctance of customers from buying refrigerated beef. This business worked because the Chicago stockyards (as cruel and as awful they looked to the casual observer) produced far less w…
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Along came one of the most underrated inventions in American history: the steam-powered grain elevator, which allowed storage and rapid unloading of huge quantities of wheat. The elevators encouraged the commingling of wheat from different farmers, which stimulated the creation of wheat standards.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • He never expressed regret for destroying humanity with a great flood, but he vows to Noah never to do it again. Rather like the Communist Party, I couldn’t help thinking, which has never apologized for the great disasters it unleashed in the 20th century, but would afterwards vow never to drown the people in another Cultural Revolution.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • One of the great American cartoonists spent five years drawing the first book of the Bible, without skipping any parts.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Everyone warned me how filthy Philip Roth can be, but no one prepared me for how riotously funny he is. Through tormented monologues, the narrator pierced various mysteries of Jewish life for me. First and foremost: their famous affinity for Chinese food. Second, their notion of guilt. Roth was especially fine on the ambivalence of the Portnoy family to assimilate: on the one hand, they celebrate their Jewish differences while trying to prevent their kids from dating shikses, and on the other hand would so like to be treated like WASPs.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • It combines the good parts of Knausgaard’s trademark — acute social observations that hide under dribbles of detail — with plot action that is heightened by supernatural tinges of Christian horror.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • It’s easy to forget that the Politburo is entirely made up of old men. Spending time with young people, in Chiang Mai or elsewhere, is a good reminder that the Politburo isn’t representative of the country. The China of the future will not look like the China ruled by old men today.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • They’re tripping out, they’re dancing in clubs, and, the most difficult act to pull off, they’re sometimes congregating to discuss how life can be better.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Some people are drifting away from China, and many of those who stay are dreaming of better futures. These are creative acts.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Storytelling really isn’t the party’s strong suit.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • The main thing in America’s favor is that Xi has been busy eroding China’s strengths. First, China’s political institutions. Though China’s political system may have demonstrated a greater track record for reform over the last 40 years, things appear pretty stuck under Xi. The US, however, doesn’t look too good either. One of the things I hear among American political and business elites is that the country needs to become much more friendly for high-skilled immigrants, but they see no political scope for doing that work. So it feels to me that the US is treating its deficiencies — an inabilit…
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • This year, I came across a lot of stories on the state of America’s defense industrial base. Most are linked to Ukraine, which blew through several years’ worth of America’s artillery stockpiles in a matter of weeks. I keep reading about ships. China built half of the world’s ships (by gross tonnage) in 2022, while the US had 0.2 percent of capacity: in practice, this meant that while China builds hundreds of new ships a year, the US builds three to five. “Quantity has a quality all its own” is a quip attributed either to Joseph Stalin or the US Navy, when it massively outproduced Japan. I hop…
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • A recent Chinese blockbuster made Thailand appear to be a dangerous place to visit, and state media has occasionally amplified that sentiment.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • After a surge of Chinese migration in the early 20th century, up to half of Bangkok’s population was Chinese, which helped to build Thailand’s trading economy and create its bourgeois society.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • One of the things this bookshop did is to translate a compilation of the Whole Earth Catalog, with a big quote of “the map is not the territory” in Chinese characters on the cover. That made me wonder: have we seen this movie before? These kids have embraced the California counterculture of the ‘90s. They’re doing drugs, they’re trying new technologies, and they’re sounding naively idealistic as they do so. I’m not expecting them to found any billion-dollar companies. But give it enough time, and I think they will build something more interesting than coins.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Digital currencies are solutions looking for problems most everywhere in the Western world, but they have real value for people who suffer from state controls. The crypto community in China has attracted grifters, as it has everywhere else. But it is also creating a community of people trying to envision different paths for the future.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • People bemoaned both how difficult life is in China and how difficult it is to emigrate. A lot of folks wanted to define themselves as “citizens of the world,” as people belonging to “Earth” rather than any nation. But that runs up against the hard fact that they hold Chinese passports, which is more difficult to travel with than many other passports.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • In 2022, police disrupted a festival they held called Wamotopia, which became a gathering point for crypto people and digital nomads. The idea was to burn a big wooden cat in a field in Dali at the conclusion of the festival, but Chinese police dispersed the event shortly after it began. So this year they moved to Thailand.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • One of these is Yunnan’s Dali, a city on the northern tip of highland Southeast Asia, where I spent much of 2022. There, one can find the remnants of a drug culture as well as a party scene for an occasional rave. But even Dali is becoming less tenable these days since the central government has cottoned on that the city is a hub for free spirits.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Several have worked in domestic Chinese media, seriously disgruntled that the censors make it difficult to publish ambitious stories. People complain of being treated like chess pieces by top leader Xi Jinping, who is exhorting the men to work for national greatness and for the women to bear their children.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • They told me that they’ve felt a quiet shattering of their worldview over the past few years. These are youths who grew up in bigger cities and attended good universities, endowing them with certain expectations: that they could pursue meaningful careers, that society would gain greater political freedoms, and that China would become more integrated with the rest of the world. These hopes have curdled. Their jobs are either too stressful or too menial, political restrictions on free expression have ramped up over the last decade, and China’s popularity has plunged in developed countries.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • The other wellspring of spiritual practice comes from the massive use of actual psychedelics, which are so easy to find in Chiang Mai.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • After meditating in silence for 20 days, one person told me that he found himself slipping in and out of hallucinogenic experiences from breath exercises alone.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Those who have ambition and entrepreneurial energy are going to Singapore. Those who have money and means are going to Japan. And those who have none of these things — the slackers, the free spirits, kids who want to chill — are hanging out in Thailand.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Those who have ambition and entrepreneurial energy are going to Singapore. Those who have money and means are going to Japan. And those who have none of these things — the slackers, the free spirits, kids who want to chill — are hanging out in Thailand.
    2023 letter | Dan Wang
  • Doing maintenance cures depression.
    The Maintenance Race - Works in Progress
  • Sometimes maintenance involves shooting the shark.
    The Maintenance Race - Works in Progress