Essay
How to Debug Your Life
I. In 1947, Grace Hopper and her team at Harvard were working on the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. The machine was massive, a deafening clatter of electromechanical relays, and
Failure vs. Success is the Wrong Frame.
How many novels exist only as "I'm still outlining"? How many startups live permanently in "stealth mode"? How many paintings never get painted because
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice.
The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer
Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks, terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians, haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made
Why My Newsletter Costs $2.50
In the 1980s, Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye discovered he was opening for The Damned at a show where tickets cost $13.50. His response was to voluntarily cut his
Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation
Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.) The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing
My Year in Review
My year in review: Some things worked. Some things didn't. The kid grew taller. The work got harder. I wrote the words anyway. Drank the coffee. Paid the
Podcasting Could Use a Good Asteroid
I'm told there are now over 4.5 million podcasts in existence. The industry is worth 40 billion dollars, 158 million Americans tune in monthly, and the medium
Everything is Dead and We Killed It.
SaaS is dead. Punk is dead again, for approximately the four hundredth time since Sid Vicious actually died in 1979. Rock is dead. The novel is dead. Cinema is dead.
Uh Oh! The Infantilization of Failure
When apps fail, when software breaks, you'll likely encounter a message constructed from a specific vocabulary: "Oops!" "Uh oh!" "Whoops!" Sometimes you&
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need. We're hungry for less, while
Growth is a Poor Man's God
We've built an entire civilization around a single metric: growth. GDP must grow. Startups must grow. Your follower count, your revenue, your personal brand, your meditation practice. The