Alex Dobrenko

Psychoanalysis, Phillips insists, should not be about coming to conclusions but coming to beginnings. Sándor Ferenczi, a close collaborator of Freud, suggested that “the patient is not cured by free-association, he is cured when he can free-associate.” Which is another way of saying the analysis is only over when it can begin.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

Patience. By nature, I’m impatient – with myself, sometimes with others. I like to move forward. I like to get things done. When there’s a problem, I prefer to fix it now . That’s true both professionally and when it comes to interpersonal relationships. When I’m trying to close a deal, I’ll find myself thinking, “What can I do to make it happen... See more

Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you.

Then along came Curt Herzstark, a young man who in the 1920s regularly traveled through the former Austrian Empire selling mechanical calculators to banks and other businesses. It was on these travels that he heard the same complaints from his customers.