Andrei Stoica

In The Poetics of Space , Gaston Bachelard argued that “intimate immensity” emerges in places that balance shelter and horizon. Suburbs invert this. Their immensity is vast but inert — horizons without revelation, shelter without intimacy. Taliesin West’s drafting studio, with its pitched roof and open sides, attempts to bridge this divide. But... See more

Some of Cowen’s theories seem to misunderstand on a fundamental level why people do things at all. Use opportunity cost to your advantage, he enjoins his reader, by scheduling a call halfway through a movie; if you don’t have to reschedule, the film wasn’t worth finishing. Desserts deliver diminishing marginal returns after the first few bites; the... See more

But then I read Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations . It is not, at first glance, a book about writing. It is a book of mathematical philosophy. By a Hungarian Stalinist, no less. But it is, if you read it sideways, a profound exploration of the act of writing. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Mathematics is, after all, a subset of writing—it is a... See more

Solitarist identity is an example of dichotomous or binary thinking, one of the cognitive distortions that are evidently becoming more common, at least among young adults in the United States, according to George Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s analysis in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Psychologists studying binary thinking have also found it... See more