April 18, 2023 • #
Read any news that intersects with politics, culture, technology, or economics, and you’d believe we’ve come to the end of the road. You find the occasional optimist pointing out how things aren’t so bad, or that they’ve also been real bad in the past (definitely true!).
Brink Lindsey paints his own bleak picture of our current set of crises — of dynamism, inclusion, and politics – but acknowledges a fear of overblowing the threats presented by these issues. In this piece he offers some hope here with confidence that we can muddle through with solutions as we...
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September 12, 2022 • #
This was a fantastic thread from The Cultural Tutor — so simple, but had me on an epic Wikipedia / Google Maps rabbit hole.
Some of my favorite examples:
Kind of sad to see so many overbearing modernist structures in here, but some of them are nothing if not impressive, at least.
His newsletter, Areopagus, is full of great tidbits on art, history, classics, architecture, rhetoric....
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September 17, 2021 • #
Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the “read-later” app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), but some of us still rely on them as essential parts of our reading experience.
The Readwise team has been moving fast the last couple years with excellent additions to the product, and I can’t believe they were also working on this for most of 2021 along with the other regular updates....
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October 10, 2020 • #
A good piece giving an inside look of what life is like for a journalist inside the bubble.
I’ve missed most of the playoffs this year during this strange time for sports. It’s been impressive that the NBA could pull this off and still put together a compelling end to the season when everyone assumed that it’d be an asterisk-ridden result with players and teams lost to COVID. It’s turned out to be incredibly well executed. The finals have nearly the same energy...
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September 30, 2020 • #
Of this year’s reads so far, Martin Gurri still holds the crown on my favorite with his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public.
That book has the best diagnosis of the current state of politics, the culture war, polarization, and the media’s inability to make sense of all of it (while contributing themselves to the chaos).
This is a wide-ranging interview on public trust, social media, and the state of our institutions:
I would not say that our institutions are mired in a period of secular incompetence and decline. That is actually...
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July 18, 2020 • #
On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere:
People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, enter a new realm that glitters with infinite possibilities. Suddenly, you can flicker like a spark between the digital and the real. The exhilarating sensation is that you have been taken to a high place and shown all the kingdoms of the world: “These can be yours, if. . . .” If your video goes viral. If...
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July 16, 2020 • #
Great piece from Tanner Greer on the evolution of online discourse from the early days of the internet to today’s firestorm of Twitter.
First, a fond look back on the early days of online conversation — the days of the blog, the forum, the pseudonymous publisher, the rule of the idea and its impassioned, argued defense:
There were two aspects of this older internet ecology that set it apart from the current get up. The first was its clear division into hundreds of separate communities. This was most explicit in the forums, which usually did not allow users to comment...
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June 24, 2020 • #
Mark Andreessen’s piece from a couple months back drove a flood of response, both in support and disagreement.
This piece from Tanner Greer agrees with Andreessen’s sentiments in general, but more interestingly dives into why American progress has slowed so dramatically, tying the root causes to change in the culture of ownership, self-reliance, and self-organization.
We live in a culture today of management hierarchy, bureaucratic approvals, designs-by-committee, taking little risk without consensus, and regulatory restriction (and, just...
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January 18, 2020 • #
Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works:
The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs between charismatic celebrity knights loosely affiliated with various citadel-like strongholds peopled by opt-in armies of mooks. The vast majority of the energy of the conflict lies in interchangeable mooks facing off against each other, loosely along lines indicated by the knights they follow, in innumerable battles that play out every minute across the IoB.
Almost none of these battles matter...
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November 23, 2019 • #
An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other users’ mouse cursors and highlights in the same document, in real time).
A fascinating paper. This research suggests the possibility that group-conforming versus individualistic cultures may have roots in diet and agricultural practices. From the abstract:
Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East...
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February 24, 2019 • #
Today we got to see the touring production of Hamilton in Tampa. It’s every bit as good as the hype.
I’m a history nerd already, so the subject matter is right up my alley. I read the book a couple of years ago and enjoyed it tremendously. I hope that the level this has reached in popular culture has increased peoples’ interest and respect for American history.
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