Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

President Trump, joined by National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., talks about an executive order aimed at reducing the cost of prescription drugs, Monday, May 12, 2025. | Eric Lee/The New York Times

Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “Gender-affirming care is a common thing that is done in society. For example, men that chew gum to help strengthen their jawline, that take low-T enhancements and testosterone, that do Rogaine or anything like that. That is something we would consider gender-affirming care.” — Democratic Rep. Ann Johnson

• “Can I Wear a Sheath Dress Without Looking Like a MAGA Woman?” — NYT headline

• “It is this fear that the people within the party, within the primary system, will have about voting for a woman because every time we’ve voted for a woman we’ve lost so far. And I think that’s a natural fear because we just want to win. So, there’s a lot of people that are like, ‘You know what, let’s go find the safest white boy we can find.’” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “Anybody who did they research voted the right way. The people that had the information, they voted the right way. These are facts. The more educated voters and the voters that went to the legacy media, frankly, they voted the right way.” — Also Jasmine Crockett

• “Bluesky honestly feels like a miracle where you take the most annoying people in the world and stick them in a broken elevator together.” — Nate Silver

• “I’ll tell ya a story. A friend of mine who’s a businessman, very, very, very top guy. Most of you would have heard of him. Highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug.” — Donald Trump

• “The President, in my view, has not hidden his racism behind a bushel. In fact, you know in his policies, whether it’s removing government workers or in this case admitting white South Africans while denying refugee status to asylum seekers from other countries, principally Central and South American and black nations to come into this country. And so, I think that this policy, while it’s not surprising in this action, really speaks to the underlying message in this administration that disrespects and shows disdains for people of color while embracing these Afrikaners.” — MSNBC’s Donna Edwards, regarding the 49 white South Africans granted refugee status by the Trump administration

• “The richest, most privileged people on the planet are drawn to any cause that makes them if not the oppressed at least proximate enough to slake the thirst of their oppression envy in a milieu that recognizes oppression as the only form of virtue.” — Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon

• “I feel like all of Montana is in the man-o-sphere.” — MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace

• “Men should not play sports against women. If anybody thinks that, I think they’re stupid.” — NBA on TNT co-host Charles Barkley

• “Team Biden would be better off taking the L and waiting a few years until the halo of nostalgia effects the partial reputational rehabilitation enjoyed by Nixon and George W. Bush.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “The directive underscores how Mr. Trump’s crusade to stamp out D.E.I. — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — is now focused not just on targeting programs and policies that may assist historically marginalized groups, but also on the very law created to protect them.” — NYT’s Erica Green, regarding Trump signing the “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” executive order

• “At a pace of one new building permit every two weeks, Los Angeles County will issue 26 rebuild permits per year, and have Pacific Palisades and Altadena rebuilt within 461 years. Mark your calendars for the final ribbon-cutting ceremonies for the spring of the year 2486.” — National Review’s Jim Geraghty

• “I believe there’s no guarantee that we are gonna have a free and fair election in 2026. I think [Trump is] trying to rig our democracy, to destroy dissent, to cripple the political opposition, so that even if his approval ratings are in the 30s in the fall of next year, there isn’t the ability for his opposition to muster a real campaign.” — Democratic Senator Chris Murphy

• “The regime is arresting mayors and judges for opposing their gross mass detention policies. That’s defcon one for democracy.” — Joy Reid

• “Earlier this semester, an NYU professor told me how he had Al-proofed his assignments, only to have the students complain that the work was too hard. When he told them those were standard assignments, just worded so current Al would fail to answer them, they said he was interfering with their ‘learning styles.’ A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due. Another said, about work on a problem set, ‘You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?’ And another, when asked about their largely Al-written work, replied, ‘Everyone is doing it.’” — Clay Shirky, the Vice Provost of Educational Technologies of New York University

• “Says something about the priorities of university admins that they mobilized to rapidly enact sweeping institutional changes during the COVID crisis (because it threatened The Money) but not AI, the gravest danger to higher ed in modern history, which merely threatens learning.” — The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper

• “We’re here to say that there’s no more waiting, no more watering down, no more putting justice on layaway. Black folks are owed more than thoughts and prayers. We’re owed repair, we’re owed restitution, and we’re owed justice.” — Democratic Rep. Summer Lee, speaking Thursday as part of a coalition of Democratic lawmakers and advocates that reintroduced a resolution to offer reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans and people of African descent

• “Watching Jake Tapper pompously prance around as if he uncovered a grand WH deceit to hide Biden’s cognitive decline would be like Nancy Pelosi writing a book denouncing members of Congress who profit off the stock market while in office.” — Glenn Greenwald

• “This man was head of the whole FBI and fancied himself Law itself just as Fauci thought he was Science. And y’all wonder why voters think sanctioned elites are personality-disordered trash and don’t accept their credentials anymore. It’s bc they’re personality-disordered trash.” — Mary Katharine Ham, regarding former FBI Director James Comey posting a vacation photo of shells arranged on a beach to spell out “8647,” which is widely understood to mean “kill Trump”

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• Vanity Fair: “Anatomy of a Miracle”

• GQ: “Hunting the Elusive Rhino-Horn Cartel of Thailand”

• The New York Times: “The Unabomber’s Brother Turned Him In. Then Spent 27 Years Trying to Win Him Back.”

• Atavist: “All That Glitters”

• Rolling Stone: “‘It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl”

• The New Yorker: “How a Frenchman Stole Two Billion Dollars Worth of Art”

• The New Yorker: “The Reckoning”

• Esquire: “The String Theory”