Brian Wiesner

People choose places; places shape people; people go on to shape other people. We should be thoughtful about the kind of transformation we opt into.

Life is nothing more than a series of stages, one after another. Our problem is that we often enjoy a particular stage so much that we’re hesitant to move to the next one. Each chapter should be enjoyable, yes, but each chapter should also prepare you for a new chapter that you could only reach by experiencing your current one . And you do, at some... See more

Once people start coupling up, the challenges only increase. Making friends with other couples “is like matchmaking for two,” said Kara Baskin, a journalist who works in Boston. “Not only are you worrying about whether the other woman likes you, you’re also worrying if her husband likes you, if your husband likes her, if your husband likes him.”

Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a... See more

There is a striking uniformity in the way creative people-artists, writers, mathemati-cians, scientists, and philosophers-speak about the process of production and problem solving. Ghiselin (1952) has collected into one volume a number of essays on the creative pro-cess by a variety of creative workers from Poincare to Picasso. As Ghiselin... See more

To state the obvious: it is very hard to work a full-time job and also write a book. I cannot imagine doing both of those things while also raising a family. You have to carve out time in the mornings and nights, and ideally block weekends because the best thing to have as a writer IMO—with novels, especially—are extended blocks of time. The brain... See more

GPT-4 is a Smart High Schooler on one dimension, and a bottom centile High Schooler on others. It’s dangerous to assume that strengthening the strong dimension will strengthen the others. No A+ physics student ever became the star quarterback by becoming an A++ physics student.

A Time We Never Knew

"Phones? No. We had each other."