Brian Wiesner

As Mireille Silcoff noted in a piece exploring how real life subcultures have been reduced to online aesthetic trends: ‘youth culture’ comes alive when the sun goes down, and by stopping young people from hanging out in cities at night, they’re ultimately cutting off the lifeblood of these scenes: “ the youth belong at the rave, at the block party,... See more

But if you think about your career from the perspective of which skills you have developed and where else they might be applicable, you’ll realize that opportunities are near-infinite . Journalists can become investors. Corporate executives can become authors. Even in the case of the most rigid disciplines such as law and medicine, nothing is... See more

Becoming a parent and engaging in the grueling work of caring for another human has brought me to the visceral realization that what this world is lacking — what we actually need most — is each other. It sounds hippie-ish and obvious, but as McKibben hints at, it’s going to become ever more serious and tangible. We are relational creatures designed... See more

I dream of many different careers, many different lives, many different loves, many different renewals of my ‘self’ as if I was an immortal being who was able to experiment and explore across an endless timeline.

Way beneath every step you’ve ever taken and every step you will take is this thing called mycelium. Long threads of fungi that grow one cell at a time, branching and re-branching, growing in every direction. They even grow three-dimensionally.

When Roman war hero Valerius Maximus Messalla brought back a sundial from Catania after capturing the city in 263 BC, the crowds cheered—but this symbolic triumph over the Sicilian city soon became an ironic triumph over the lives of Roman citizens. The foreign timekeeping device, installed in the Roman Forum, heralded many more that were soon... See more

Making the internet work for creators

The second reason why Ben’s milestone is significant is that he, better than anyone else, has identified and articulated the force that has overwhelmingly shaped online media over the past decade: Aggregation Theory.

Ben’s theory describes how and why a few major platforms have come to dominate the flow of... See more

As Oldenburg notes, people’s roles at home and the office are carefully circumscribed, but there’s no status markers at the dive bar except for the ability to drive conversation. That means the tone of such a chat is more playful than purposeful and that it’s completely democratic — if either party stops being entertained at any point, they can... See more