Andrei Stoica

Once a year, the winners of EV grants are invited to an “UnConference” in Virginia, which is designed as an intellectual petri dish for people to mingle and spawn ideas. Talks are given with no preparation and to no schedule, in randomly arranged discussion groups that you can leave whenever you please. In the evening, buses take groups out to one... See more

There’s a fascinating On Being interview with Nick Cave from a couple years ago, where he discussed his belief that “ Religion is spirituality with rigor .” Whereas religion actively asks something of us, he explained, spirituality can feel squishier, less demanding and therefore, he implied, less rewarding.

If the societal remedies inspired by a degraded discourse of doom leave much to be desired, then the individual actions prescribed by this degraded discourse only generate further discontent. If your city truly is doomed, then amidst heightened pessimism about governmental efficacy, exit seems the only logical choice. During the pandemic, the media... See more

One of the worst mistakes we ever made was making email instantaneous. We should have built in a two-hour buffer unless you flagged the email as time-sensitive or urgent. Why is that? Because now everybody has to check their email every 10 or 15 minutes on the off chance that someone has sent them a time-sensitive email. So the burden falls on the... See more

I also suspect that Americans feel that their society is a highly mobile one. John Steinbeck is often (mis)quoted as saying that “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” But the flip side of this is that a lot of rich Americans see themselves... See more