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

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

Thinking about it a bit more, I realize that looking for the fun is a special case of a more general insight. There are other emotional cues that point toward the interesting, besides fun. Laura Deming, for example, describes her curiosity as a kind of rage (“ but what in Newton’s name is heat actually????? What is temperature????” ).

It was also interesting, to me at least, to note the body language and between point box-bickering that consumes much of a Musetti and Shapovalov between-point routine. Both men appear tormented, and waste so much energy and attention on things that are simply out of their control. The difference between these two, versus Alcaraz and Sinner, or... See more