Brian Wiesner

A Time We Never Knew

"Phones? No. We had each other."

Admittedly, an increased difficulty in impressing friends with neat tips and trivia hardly constitutes a social crisis. And perhaps benefiting from closely kept secrets was too easy in the past, anyway: In my Punch-Out example, I gained a disproportionately large amount of esteem for something that required very little effort or skill. But when... See more

Good things come to those who write

The rise in teen depression coincides with the proliferation of smartphones and social media. “It’s very suspicious that teen anxiety and depression really started to take off around 2012, because that’s when 50 percent of Americans owned a smartphone, when social media went from optional to virtually mandatory, and when smartphones got... See more

Stuart Andrew, the British minister for loneliness, told me that one of the challenges of loneliness is the stigma that surrounds it.

When we sing in the shower, we hardly expect applause. In fact, that would be awfully weird.

But online, when just about anyone might be clicking, watching or sharing, it’s disappointing to put your work into the world and hear nothing.

Nothing but a black hole that absorbs your best work and reflects nothing back.

And if that happens again and again,... See more

Spaniards are good at living close together – with around 90% of the population now squashed into less than 30% of the country’s territory, they’ve little choice. What’s more, 65% live in flats – almost half of all pisos measure between 60 and 90 metres squared.

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

These two archetypes both embody a sense of superiority for their way of life. Morning cities love bragging about the integrity of early starts, which (in their minds) automatically make them better: more ambitious, virtuous. And maybe there’s some truth to that: scientists talk about the morning morality effect, which posits that people behave... See more