Alex Burns

But most websites today prioritize efficiency and usability, which leads to a kind of architectural sameness. “Everybody's house sort of looks the same,” he says, “you're taking the same hallway... because we’ve fallen into the same UI patterns.” He wonders about a new kind of website that invites curiosity rather than just guiding a behavior.... See more

Taken together, we can combine them into what we might call a hierarchy of information :

• Raw data: the endless stream of posts, likes, bot spam


• Information: headlines, hashtags, trending things


• Knowledge: the narratives we share and fight over.


• Understanding: recognizing what might not be real (or is hyperreal)


• Wisdom: systemic analysis, the ability to

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I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”

If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:

• Which kind of

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The past several years have ushered in a wave of “brand” tales in Hollywood—films that speak to America’s prodigious capitalist ethos, just in case you forgot to look at a billboard. From Blackberry to Air to Flamin’ Hot ,these films have captured the full spectrum of brand power, documenting the highs, lows, and synthetic cheeses of big business.... See more

This is second-order vanity. The term was coined by David Foster Wallace, in his 1987 novel The Broom of the System. “A vain person is concerned that people not perceive him as stupid, or dull, or ugly, et cetera et cetera,” his character explains—that’s first-order vain (the classic). “Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who’s also... See more