NYC tech’s newest symbol of peak status is a studio space built around a creative collective. The current wave of VCs & founders are running their businesses out of “Brooklyn-based studios” and investing in “the art of company building” predicated on taste. It’s all connected

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The new high-status thing is being a creative, high-p... See more

In our present technological era, humans have also needed a new framework to avoid drowning in the daily firehose of entertainment, media, and information. Given this setting of increasing complexity, it becomes more appealing to use an associative concept like “vibes” as a simplifying framework for understanding or self-expression. If we can’t mak... See more

For all the hype that surrounds them, neural networks can’t reflect or explain anything deeper about cultural or societal phenomena any more than sharing a favorite character from The Office can predict long-term compatibility with a Tinder match. These systems can only instrumentalize taste; they turn any expression of self into a reductive data p... See more

Adam Kirsch, in his piece about the Amtrak residency, theorized: “Perhaps there is a certain charm in the fact that the train is an obsolete mode of transportation, much as literature sometimes suspects that it is an obsolete form of communication.”

By unfolding I mean “interrogating the conclusion to come up with an explanation of why it could be true.” What premises and reasoning chains leads to this conclusion? The explanation isn’t meant to prove that your conclusion was right. It is just a way of unpacking it.

By unfolding a claim into an explanation, you spread it on a “wider front” (to b... See more

Note that the key phenomena are not movements. They are not collective efforts to build social capital around any particular idea or aesthetic or value. Nor are they forms of propaganda or prestige. The real core activities of culture are disciplines of craft aimed at actually achieving something great, regardless of what everyone else thinks. They... See more

I’ve come to think there’s a Cultural Doppler Effect.What sounds right in the moment feels different and dated to a time and place later on. This is true of fashion, design, music, beliefs, literally everything.

The Cultural Doppler Effect is what makes “retro.” As past cultural waves wash over us, their context is not as they first appeared. They r... See more

Aspirations — even unlikely ones, maybe especially unlikely ones — are an essential part of living well. When we are at our most ailing, we are reduced to thinking and talking only of our ailments. When we are at our most vigorous, our most alive, we think and talk of our goals and aspirations. Over long time frames, the pessimist becomes an unobse... See more