Philosophy
The empire always falls
A citizen of Rome in 117 AD, under Emperor Trajan, would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing. The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the
Communities are not fungible
There's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you "
Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays
We plan our lives like we're editing a movie trailer. The trip to Portugal, or the product launch, or the transformation photo at the gym. The big moment
Why Intelligence Is a Terrible Proxy for Wisdom
Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientific minds in human history, lost a fortune in the South Sea Bubble of 1720. After initially making money and selling his shares, he
The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
In September 2016, the security journalist Brian Krebs had his website knocked offline by a botnet called Mirai. Hundreds of thousands of compromised devices, mostly cheap webcams and DVRs manufactured
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
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
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