I’m still puzzled why NPR and CNN and Harvard and other legacy institutions haven’t set up on Substack. But they clearly have zero interest in doing so—even if they could make money and expand their audience. Yet these same institutions launched on Threads the very first day. They couldn’t sign up as soldiers for Mark Zuckerberg’s new empire fast enough.

💬 Ted Goia

Read it

Defendant’s four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.

💬 Judge Chutkan

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

💬 Upton Sinclair

We can do it quick, fast and safe, but it doesn’t necessarily taste great.

💬 Chris Young

Chris is McDonald’s senior director of global menu strategy.

Three thoughts

Global Menu Strategy is a job! Who knew?

Isn’t ‘taste’ his job? .. So is he new in and shaking it up .. or is it his fault?

I wonder what his boss thinks of that quote?

We are here on Earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for I do not know.

💬 W. H. Auden

💬 via John Naughton

Somewhere else on the interwebs, my friend Perry Offer wrote …

There is no power for those who want it, in truth.

💬 Perry Offer

… which I had been meaning to capture in here for posterity … and then I stumbled on this.

Truth Requires Power — Truth in itself is no power at all, in spite of all that flattering rationalists are in the habit of saying to the contrary. Truth must either attract power to its side, or else side with power, for otherwise it will perish again and again. This has already been sufficiently demonstrated, and more than sufficiently!

💬 Friedrich Nietzsche

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

💬 Ursula Le Guin

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

💬 Voltaire

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.

💬 Annie Dillard

I have never seen so many tech CEOs come to town to wine, dine and opine.

💬 Jessica Lessin

(On Joe and Xi hanging in SFO.)

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Via John Naughton

💬

Let’s call it ‘his brand’.

The word world, even when preceded by the immodest adjective real, is a self-consciously anthropocentric one that seems curiously aware of its own artificiality. Unlike planet, which decenters the human, or universe, which renders the human infinitesimal, world seems to carry with it an unspoken irrational commitment to the centered human, with all the absurdities such centering entails.

💬 Venkatesh Rao