Alex Burns

The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking . Our imaginations are inherently limited; they can’t include all details at once. (Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the... See more

Yesterday, ESPN reported that Ippei Mizuhara, the former translator who is accused of stealing $16 million from Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani to pay for his gambling addiction,has a connection to The Real Housewives of Orange County .

I really never thought this day would come. An ESPN headline about one of the biggest sports betting... See more

It’s fitting, then, that A24 and director Jane Schoenbrun have staked a large part of the movie’s experience on another relic of the pre-streaming era: the compilation soundtrack. The I Saw the TV Glow OST is the type of project you don’t see much of in 2024. It’s a who’s who of indie music mixed with a handful of rising artists, all providing... See more

Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

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Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.

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Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

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Building specific knowledge will

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Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it... See more

Thanks to the alleged love triangle, Rodrigo and Carpenter have that built in. They have very thinly veiled songs about each other — a territory some of those past “rivals” have never really ventured in.

But what makes the Rodrigo-Carpenter dynamic unique is that they’ve both figured out how to make the “rivalry” work in their favor, embracing their... See more