The data informs and influences us, but we choose based on the totality of our experience

There is so much I loved in those archives. There is so much I would delight in rediscovering. But I can’t find what matters in the morass. I’ve given up on trying.

Studios, he said, are not “interested any longer in supporting individual voices that express their personal feelings or their personal thoughts and personal ideas and feelings on a big budget. And what’s happened now is that they’ve pigeonholed it to what they call indies.”

But that’s online dating, I’ve always thought: random and chaotic and terrible and weird and then — with time or patience — transformative.

brands solve coordination problems. Advertising taps a basic need of people to conform to the norms of the community they’re in

It occurs to me, much later than it occurred to the archivists, that we have never possessed such a complete and damning record of our past interactions. I can tell you every college scholarship I never got. Every sale at The Gap for the past 18 years. Every flight I’ve ever taken, anywhere in the world. Most grocery lists, news alerts, heartbreaks... See more

Being rich is nice, but what you really want to optimize for is (1) an income that exceeds your spending by a healthy margin and (2) a lifestyle that is free from rushing

At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous. This is... See more