Brian Wiesner

This order created uncoordinated systems that worked, without staff, as if by magic. Such was Jacobs’s “Sidewalk Ballet.” With density, she argued, came “eyes on the street,” a community-based security system that required neither barbed wire nor an extensive police presence. With wide sidewalks comes trusted interactions, even with strangers—a... See more

Why we love cities that never sleep.

As Bill McKibbenwrote recently, the best thing you can do to prepare yourself for climate change is live in an area with a high degree of social trust.

We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75

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Takeaways from Jerry Seinfeld on Tim Ferriss:

• To survive in comedy you have to be a writer

• “As any writer can tell you it’s 95% re-write”

• “I think I could solve just about anyone’s life, I don’t care what you do, with weight training and transcendental meditation” Jerry Seinfeld

• “If you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in, the last

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This new model takes what we have learned from the Aggregation Era and finds a way to blend it with the independence enjoyed by the “sovereign writer”—or, to be appropriately expansive, let’s call it “sovereign creator.” It is, I believe, the natural model of the internet, taking advantage of the web’s massive scale and interconnectivity and... See more

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

Even the sound of the word repels the smartest and most creative among us. You hear it and think, well that isn’t for me. Networking feels icky and so boring. It is something that a gel-haired sales bro does to fool people into buying what they’re selling. Not me.

It’s transactional. It feels daunting and unnatural. Plus, imagine mustering up the... See more

The Cultural Tutor perfectly sums up why beauty matters: “what’s the danger of a world without beauty?” they ask. “If everything is simply functional, simply useful, then life becomes a mere conveyor belt. It turn humans into machines of consumption, labour, & reproduction. Aren’t we more than that?”