Foundry

because we’ve established that you’re my kind of weirdo, whether or not you’ve admitted it to yourself yet, I can tell you with complete confidence that you’ll love Taiwan. Secret dumpling houses and coffee shops and speakeasies and bookstores hidden in urban mazes that make every stroll a treasure hunt. Mist rising from neon green tea plantations.

Don’t even try to object. I refuse to believe that anyone with such generic taste would make it this far in this particular narrative. Almost everyone has never heard of this story. Of the few that have, yet fewer chose to embark on the journey. And then there are those odd ducks who kept going and then kept going some more until they arrived at th

There’s a deep pattern at work here. You’ll only extract coffee’s richest flavors if they have mineral impurities to bond with. Snowflakes form around tiny specks of dust churning in the atmosphere. A few words of affirmation from a seventh-grade teacher changes the life path of the student third from the left in the back row. There are moments tha

“People who manage people live on calendar time,” said Jerry. “People who solve problems live outside time, at least temporarily. When people who manage people who solve problems forget that interruption is sabotage, things fall apart.”

I told myself this wasn’t the right time, knowing full well that those who tell themselves that particular lie so often discover that the right time never comes.

Every once in a while an unexpected earthquake like the invention of agriculture or nuclear weapons changes the landscape abruptly, but all that power never stops flowing, it just finds a new route back to the source. The internet was just such an earthquake. It is refactoring politics and money and romance and entertainment and work and identity a

The moral of Damocles’s story is to beware envying the lives of the powerful, for a life of power is a life lived in terror.

Caroline wasn’t a person. She was a fractal.

If you know something’s going to work, it’s not worth working on. It requires no courage. It requires no faith. It requires no skin in the game. Whether you’re a spy or a teacher or a spouse or a painter or an abuela or an astronaut or a monk or a barista or a board-game designer, the bits that matter are the bits you make matter by putting yoursel