Briana Wall

The public money has dried up, in other words, but so has a whole lot of the private money. You might not have noticed the ramifications quite yet, but you will. It’s in the increasingly ardent pleas from your local NPR station, of course, but it’s also just absence: the film festival or day camp or curated exhibition or concert series that just do... See more

what Oliver Burkeman calls the efficiency trap. I read about this idea in his book Four Thousand Weeks, which is a critique of productivity culture and isn’t strictly related to AI or anything like it, but maybe you’ll see the connection too. “Rendering yourself more efficient,” he writes, “either by implementing various productivity techniques or ... See more

What magicians like Ricky Jay offer us is a reminder that it can be infinitely better to live life in the questions, reveling in the absurd and experimental, than to know exactly how everything works or ought to. Beyond that, they teach us that wonder, more than merely a worthwhile human experience, is something that requires active protection—a wi... See more