Daniel Xu

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on the atlas — 13

highlights — 20

Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia, and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME
Gary Shteyngart: Crying Myself to Sleep on the Icon of the Seas - The Atlantic
What’s maddening for those alert to its dangers is that H.B.V.—a problem we know how to solve—still struggles to find attention and funding amid other public-health concerns. It continues to pose a possibly fatal threat to those who missed out on the vaccine, or who were born before universal childhood immunization.
A Cancer-Causing Virus Hiding in Millions of Americans | The New Yorker
Bieber, the former child star who, now past thirty, often gestures at a deep well of discontent, is currently in a stripped-down, melancholy, D.I.Y. phase. A guy who gets famous in the music business at such a young age—Bieber was barely a teen-ager when the world came to know his high, clear voice and innocent face—can’t help but be labelled a product, furnished with beats and lyrics, and made to play a part. Now Bieber wants us to know that he’s got his own ideas, his own artistry, his own bad mood. The only way to get the message across is to raze the usual clutter of spectacle.
Justin Bieber, Pop Music’s Fallen Angel, Rises Again at Coachella | The New Yorker
So many people seem to be yearning for belonging and direction, and they’re searching for it in partnership, in the nuclear family, in the monogamous ideal that connects diverse Americans at one fragile point of unison. But that very priority might be distracting them from any broader sense of connection—from feeling, finally, like they’re part of something bigger.
The Most Tortured Relationship in America - The Atlantic
When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat - The Atlantic
When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist.
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat - The Atlantic
No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat - The Atlantic
These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat - The Atlantic
Having emptied out the party—the great commons of a mass-media audience—how do you start it up again?
Justin Bieber, Pop Music’s Fallen Angel, Rises Again at Coachella | The New Yorker
In the new year, Musk welcomed Hegseth to a meeting at SpaceX headquarters, where Hegseth unveiled a new partnership with Grok, which lately had been spending most of its time removing the clothes of women and children in photographs.
Anthropic and Donald Trump’s Dangerous Alignment Problem | The New Yorker
hat the job really boils down to is this the fullest realization of man's possibilities, whether by the individual, by the community, or by the species in its processional adventure along the corridors of time.
Transhumanism
The new understanding of the universe has come about through the new knowledge amassed in the last hundred years - by psychologists, biologists, and other scientists, by archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. It has defined man's responsibility and destiny - to be an agent for the rest of the world in the job of realizing its inherent potentialities as fully as possible.
Transhumanism
Not every consensus of the past is worth clinging to, of course. But as a society, we are making an enormously risky bet: that we can reap the rewards of a runaway gambling industry without paying any price; that the litany of social ills long associated with this vice—addiction and impoverishment, isolation and abuse, cheating and chasing and corrosive idleness—can, this time, be kept in check; that, unlike every civilization that came before us, we can beat the house.
My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler - The Atlantic
Even more recently, California’s growth was half the numbers seen in Texas and Florida, with younger and higher earners disproportionately leaving.
Why is it so expensive to build affordable homes in CA? | Opinion
A privately financed apartment building that takes just over two years to produce from start to finish in Texas would take over four years in California. It takes twice as long to gain project approvals and the construction timeline is 1.5 times longer. That means land costs must be carried for longer, equipment and labor are on jobsites longer, and that loans are taken out for a longer term, and so on.
Why is it so expensive to build affordable homes in CA? | Opinion
But the biggest thing driving up California apartment costs? Time.
Why is it so expensive to build affordable homes in CA? | Opinion
How To Fix Your Attention Span (Before It's Too Late)
How To Fix Your Attention Span (Before It's Too Late) - YouTube
Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind
Amazon.com: Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind: 9781638932932: Zengerle, Jason: Books
Thirty years ago, as a young magazine reporter, Carlson liked to make sport of Joseph Sobran, the conservative writer who’d been William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s protégé at National Review but, in the early nineteen-nineties, was fired from the magazine for his anti-Israel and antisemitic views. Carlson would joke that he’d run into a rambling, dishevelled Sobran at a suburban Denny’s, where he sat by himself in a booth, holding court before an audience of no one. It is tempting to think that Carlson has followed in Sobran’s ignominious footsteps, that he has suffered the same fate as the man he onc…
Tucker Carlson’s Nationalist Crusade | The New Yorker
Downs posited the paradox of voting, which claimed that significant elements of political life could not be explained in terms of voter self-interest.
Anthony Downs