Agalia Tan

When confronted with the unknown that looms ahead of him and Ilya at the end of the first season, all Shane can muster is, “We just want a future.” He speaks for all of us. Heated Rivalry has broken through the onslaught of pop culture visions that make dystopia’s cynical, joyless futures seem inexorable precisely because it is a piece of art that... See more

"It's really upsetting to me that what happened to the way that we talk about feminism, the way that we talk about being a person and a woman. It's become that now people are going to judge each other for how much money they make. What happened? We actually think that being a billionaire is not entirely an immoral thing? What happened to the Occupy... See more

We are now in the era of the AI-born LinkedIn expert. Their mastery is dropping a story into ChatGPT and asking for a perky LinkedIn post summarizing it. (LinkedIn even has its own AI writing assistant that encourages people to “Rewrite with AI” to serve up this slop.) They snatch the thoughts and research of others, reconstitute it, and present it... See more

Once, we made sense of the world with sweeping narratives that provided a comforting sense of mastery. Now, with those narratives shattered beyond repair by a reality too complex for us to fathom, a new kind of coping mechanism is emerging—one where we make peace with the limits of our agency rather than pretending to overcome them. The task is no... See more

Is it clear to you when a trend forecast is coming from amateurs versus the professionals?

ES: I mean, no. I think an amateur and a professional have kind of an equal chance at hitting the nail on the head. True flashes of cultural insight happen where you’re lucky enough to just put the right words against the cultural phenomenon at the right... See more

This urge might be semi-subconscious, a drift toward the real-time (or the appearance of such) and a slow dismissal of the pre-made. Livestreamed video is hard to fake, and a live interview is, on some baseline level, authentic. The spoken language of a three-hour podcast episode is messy, meandering, and often internally inconsistent, but it has... See more

Will you use this opportunity to grow and evolve or will you use it to beat yourself up?

Ideas start out small, weak and fragile. 

In order to grow, ideas need financial capital. 

But they also need emotional capital — good energy, positivity, and resilience. The best way to control your emotional capital is to fine tune your internal monologue and... See more