Pavlo > Recent Status Updates

“…there need be no rivalry between beauty and goodness if an artwork is good when and because it is beautiful. If art succeeds artistically insofar as it is populated by complex characters, and it succeeds ethically insofar as it resists the lure of caricature, then aesthetic success is moral success.”

“Perhaps to Perry and Emba, who do not seem to put much stock in pleasure, a lifetime of renunciation does not sound so grueling. But it occurs to me, who prefers to eat when I am hungry, to ask: Why not effect the sort of political change that would in turn improve our tastes, thereby rendering self-regulation needless? In other words, why not fight for the possibility of ethical pleasure?”

„David French does [Emba] the favor of clarifying in an approving missive about her book in his Atlantic newsletter. “Sex without love is a danger to human hearts,” he cautions—as if sex with love, or love itself, posed no danger.”

"...It is no mystery that he continues to trade in sensibility and evocation—a whiff of woodsmoke here, a flash of picket fencing there—and not in details about policy, which can be dismissed as the petty province of small-minded technocrats. What is rigor but a liberal affectation, a needle pricking at the exalted balloon of Big Ideas?”

"Deneen, whose book appeared on Obama’s annual reading list in 2018, is canny enough to understand that he cannot follow his premises to their authoritarian conclusions without ceding all claim to legitimacy. It is no mystery that he continues to trade in sensibility and evocation—a whiff of woodsmoke here, a flash of picket fencing there—and not in details about policy..."

“[Deneen] is representative in his resistance to tracing the concrete contours of the world he would prefer to the supposed disenchantments of liberalism,perhaps because clarity would invite critique (or ridicule). It is all well and good to bluster about the beauty of marriage, but in practice, the only way to ensure that people who do not want to get married do so despite their antipathy is to mandate the practice"

“The thirteenth-century canoness Juliana of Cornillon told nurses and family members who entreated her to eat that she was saving herself for “better and more beautiful food.” Aren’t we all? But until we ascend to the celestial restaurant, I recommend bingeing to bursting. If it is never enough, try to love that about it. Try to savor the slivers of salvation hidden in all that hideous hunger.”

“[Susan Sontag] is vehement that Persona is not an erotic movie, about which I think she could not be more mistaken. What does eroticism consist in if not the impossible urge to smash through the skin and reach all the way to the beloved’s bloody core?”

“Surrealism’s great gift to sensibility was to make melancholy cheerful.”

“I wasn’t eager to go to bat for older industries or institutions, but there was something to be said for history, context, deliberation. There was something to be said for expertise. But also, if we were going to abandon expertise, I thought, in moments of deep pettiness, then why weren’t my friends being given millions of dollars to run research projects on making better cities?”

“There was a running joke that the tech industry was simply reinventing commodities and services that had long existed. This joke was disliked by many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, though I thought they should be thankful for the diversion: it moved the conversation away from structural questions about why certain things, like mass transit, or housing, or urban development, had problems in the first place.”

“First-principles thinking: Aristotelian physics, but for the management-science set. [...] College dropouts re-architected the university, skinning it down to online trade schools. Venture capitalists ... funding startups offering home loans. Multiple founders raised money to build communal living spaces in neighborhoods where people were getting evicted for living in communal living spaces."

“Is this just how things are now? I asked. It was bizarre to me that two different groups [Gamergate and the anti-woke far-right conspiracy theorists] would have the same rhetorical and tactical strategies.
My coworker was a connoisseur of online forums and bulletin boards. He looked at me askance. 'Oh, my sweet summer child,' he said. 'They are absolutely the same people.'"

“Over a year had passed since I left. I caught myself searching for my own face anyway.”

“Walking through downtown Brooklyn, the force of time tumbling forward, I felt, for a moment, that I might viscerally understand some of the rage and grief I witnessed from longtime residents back in San Francisco.”

“'We are making products,' the CEO said, building us up at a Tuesday team meeting, 'that can push the fold of mankind.'"

This is like reading Dickens

SF was a historically corrupt government, + a housing market built atop racist urban-renewal policies—real estate values had benefited as much from redlining as from discriminatory zoning practices + midc. internment camps – but these narratives, along with the reality that an entire generation had been prematurely lost to AIDS, undercut its reputation as a mecca for the free and freakish, people on the fringe