Brian Wiesner

Rarely do we think of creatives as wealthy or successful, even cracking jokes about the wastefulness of art degrees and theater classes. We have heard how pursuing creativity is not a safe career move, whether that means chasing an interest in literature, music, or some other endeavor.

Incense has been used for timekeeping in China and Japan for centuries, constituting a different, olfactory way of experiencing time. Lighting a stick of incense when welcoming someone at the door is a gentle way to signal that one has (or has not yet) overstayed their welcome. The more intricate incense clock originated in China in the Song... See more

Why we love cities that never sleep.

I am a massive advocate of ensuring you have some peaceful time alone. After all, I’m a devoted introvert . I love time alone to think. I love long walks where I can muse on ideas and let thoughts churn and mature. But, experiencing something as a group isn’t about thinking.

This is about belonging - it goes to the core of what it is to be human.

Of... See more

“A Spaniard’s social agility is superior to their fierce feelings of personal independence.” Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain.

language models are not intelligent in the ways that even small children are intelligent, but they are already superhuman at tasks like summarization, translation (both linguistic and conceptual), and association. And when you apply those skills to artfully curated source material written by equally, but differently, gifted humans, magic can... See more

To simplify it only a little: in the first stage, a country is poor, and thinks it is poor. This is the baseline for basically every pre-industrial society and for some third-world countries today.

In the second stage, it is rapidly becoming rich but still believes it is poor. The prospect of acquiring wealth and of being a nation on the upswing... See more

101 ways to make and maintain friendships

An aggregator like Facebook or Airbnb brings all the relevant goods, services, or information that a consumer might seek into one place, and it gathers all the consumers there, too. Netflix is a one-stop shop for film and television. YouTube is a one-stop shop for user-generated video. Uber is a one-stop shop for car rides. These aggregators amass... See more