Basically, a fairy tale right up the Grimm brothers’ alley. Have you actually read that shit? It’s dark.

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.

If you have friends who work in intelligence, do not throw them surprise birthday parties. One of two things will happen. Either they’ll discover your plans and ruin the effect, or you’ll take them by surprise and leave their nerves jangling for the next eighteen months.

But hegemony slips away from those who rest easy. As soon as you take something for granted, fate revokes the grant. The US drained its coffers on useless wars and bitter infighting, failing to tackle problems of sufficient ambition to lead the world, instead of merely ruling it—not unlike the progeny of a wealthy family blowing their inheritance

Wealth is wanting what you have. Money is a tool for trading what you have for what you want.

They could have stocked a pour-over setup or a French press or even an AeroPress. But no, our coffee was all pods, no beans.

When someone says you’re a natural, it just means they don’t realize how much practice you’ve had.

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

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