Quotes and Links

A week in review

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon does an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024.

Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of various notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best reading material I’ve come across.

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• “Doing your own research is a good way to end up being wrong” — Headline from The Washington Post

• “Today, we celebrate the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — a visionary who saw what could be, unburdened by what had been.” — Kamala Harris, who seemingly cannot help herself from saying “unburdened by what had been” anytime she speaks in public

• “We danced in the streets when Joe Biden was elected. Do you remember? American cities staged the greatest spontaneous outpouring of joy since V-J Day with cars honking and strangers high-fiving one another on an unusually warm November weekend.” — New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait

• “If you do not control the borders, you are going to destroy our country.” — JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon

• “My fantasy is 5x fewer people working for the government all paid 3x more their current salary.” — Venture capitalist Mike Solana

• “How in the year of our lord 2024 can we still not cancel elevator floor requests selected by mistake?” — Also Mike Solana

• “Let’s not forget, officers died [on Jan. 6], right, police officers died because of the injuries they sustained on that day.” — Karine Jean-Pierre; no officers died on Jan. 6

• “As [Biden] always does, he’s working around the clock!” — Also Karine Jean-Pierre; according to RNC research, Biden has spent 40% of his presidency on vacation, which is a record

• “Jailing an elected President on charges as novel and dubious as those Trump is facing would, according to any interpretation of the American tradition, justify large-scale political violence and total delegitimization of the existing government.” — Podcaster Darryl Cooper

• “The massive and historic size of Trump’s victory [in Iowa] should lead to some self-reflection about what caused the complete collapse of faith in the legitimacy of US institutions of authority and justice, whereby voters so easily disregard 4 felony cases as irrelevant if not an asset.” — Glenn Greenwald

• “I’m sorry, but [Trump] is gonna be convicted.” — Rachel Maddow, who said MSNBC cut Trump’s victory speech because “there’s a cost to airing untrue things”

• “Why You Shouldn’t Exercise to Lose Weight” — Headline from Time magazine

• “I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic by saying this next election is about whether or not we can have elections in this country.” — Biden campaign advisor and Democrat rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, during an interview on CNN (he said the same thing during an interview on MSNBC)

• “Covid is raging in Gaza, further disabling the vulnerable population there who is being slammed with variants cooked up in the USA by many people like you guys who won’t even advocate for masking in grocery stores so disabled ppl can safely purchase food.” — Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz

• “A self-survey conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, found that, during a search for faculty in the life sciences department, 76 percent of applicants were eliminated solely on the basis of their diversity statements.” — Reason’s Greg Lukianoff

• “There’s a crisis at the border, and I don’t know how anybody could pretend that there isn’t.” — John Fetterman

• “Half the reason the Team Misinformation people bug me is because it’s just so obvious what they’re doing, taking genuinely contentious discussions and stigmatizing the positions that don’t match their politics with the thinnest imaginable reeds of expert authority.” — Polling guru Nate Silver

• “We’ve always been for controlling our border, for securing the border — there’s never been a question about that!” — Nancy Pelosi, during an interview on MSNBC

• “We have this mantra that I hear across the aisle all the time: that parents know best. That’s wrong.” — Democrat rep. Dave Considine

• “Trump supporters cite his economic record as a reason to vote for him, but that’s a bit puzzling. Because his economic record is only good if you leave off what happened from March 2020 to the end of his administration.” — Axios

• “Airbus Is Pulling Ahead as Boeing’s Troubles Mount,” from The New York Times.

• A Harper’s story about “the trials of trucking school.”

• “The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives,” by N.S. Lyons.

• Tablet: “America Works. DEI Doesn’t.”

• “The Whale Who Went AWOL,” from New York Times Magazine.

• A Daily Beast piece on “Why We Can’t Just Shrug Off the Fani Willis Scandal.”

• “A Second Life for My Beloved Dog,” from The Atlantic.

• Another piece from The Atlantic about “murder and lies in small-town Hawaii.”