Brandon Marcus

The key change in the 1970s engineered by Chicago’s law and economics school was to eliminate any sort of meaningful power analysis in antitrust law, in favor of an efficiency analysis.

Arbitrary coercion is immoral

For newsrooms and funders, the takeaway is equally clear: this is a workable template: A creator with community trust + a newsroom with editorial rigor = journalism that reaches further and lands deeper.

making journalism more of an exchange – a partnership between community and journalism so that people don't feel like they're outside of it, that it's not extractive

I see publishing brands scrambling to get out of the ads on pages business models of publishing. Nobody knows what’s coming, of course, only it’s safe to say, we are entering into a period of the job of publishing brands will increasingly shift to convening.

I’ve been tracking a new North Star metric for The Rebooting. It’s AAR, or audience... See more

. You have to gradually ramp up your capacity to handle complex ideas and precise prose. I read a few hours a day, and I mostly read books that are comfortable for me to read, well within my range. It is more important to keep the reading experience easy enough that I keep going and going and going, than to always push myself to that edge. By... See more

When I want to be transformed, I chase my reading, to use Robin Hanson’s phrase. “Hunting has two main modes: searching and chasing,” Hanson writes. “With searching you look for something to chase. With chasing, in contrast, you have a focus of attention that drives your actions.” Searching is when I’m reading without a clear aim and continue to... See more

The hyperindividualism of our age is not going to be going back into the bottle. You’ve got to square the circle. You’ve got to let people still feel they’re independent individuals, yet they are giving themselves up to something that is awesome, greater, and more powerful that carries them into the future beyond their own existence. That’s what... See more

The spaces previous generations filled with close human relationships we fill with identities. This is how people are more connected than ever while being lonelier and having fewer close relationships than any generation in modern memory. We’re more connected to the many selves within us than we are to each other.