“This is the future many fear for the web: AI-generated junk suffocating online platforms like algal blooms that choke the life out of ponds.”

Google “is essentially unwinding years of open-office plan theory popularized by Silicon Valley — that cramming more workers into smaller spaces and taking away their privacy leads to better collaboration.”

Google’s Plan for the Future of Work | NYT

"Directory structure isn’t just unintuitive to students — it’s so intuitive to professors that they have difficulty figuring out how to explain it."

"We fall prey to Elevated Stupidity because we’re tired. … We’re overwhelmed and inundated with content, and as human beings, we’re desperate to do the minimum amount of research that allows us to keep on believing what already makes us feel good about ourselves. So we subcontract the reading and the thought. We find a person with the weary mien and broad vocabulary of someone who must have gone to all the trouble of thinking independently, and when they reach the conclusion we started with, we say, ‘See?’ Unfortunately, too often that means delegating your serious thought to an exhausted racist with a thesaurus."

"We live in the Hot-Take Economy, with three major news-yelling networks and a full bench of second-stringers. There are eight podcasts for every man, woman, and child on earth and too many web publications to count. The machine needs fuel, and the cheapest option is consistently the Idea Nobody’s Heard Yet. Express a fresh idea for the first time and it might juice up your YouTube subscriber numbers, get you on Joe Rogan, put your name in people’s mouths. But cheap fuel is dirty fuel. Sometimes the reason an idea has not been expressed publicly before is that it’s bad."

"Just because we’ve managed to weather this storm, doesn’t mean it’s an optimal way to work. If you’re in a shipwreck and a piano top floats by, it becomes a lifesaver. But it’s not the way you would have designed a lifesaver."

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“A research psychologist who has studied selective attention, said there may be ‘a memory phenomenon going on here.’ …

Because of the pandemic, 'we have fewer recent experiences of being impressed by the spring flowers, so they become even more impressive.’

And when people did venture out last year, they were probably focused on social distancing and fear of the virus, he said, not on spring flowers.

"Everybody’s looking at this spring with a different set of eyes, right? If you left a prison or a cave after six months, you know, even a butterfly will look like a work of art."

"Real, live, inspiring human energy exists when we coagulate together in crazy places like New York City. Feeling sorry for yourself because you can’t go to the theater for a while is not the essential element of character that made New York the brilliant diamond of activity it will one day be again."

"More than four months into the pandemic, Americans are swimming — and sometimes drowning — in an ocean of information that, paradoxically, is also a desert of clarity and consensus."