Opinion | A Legendary World Builder on Multiverses, Revolution and the ‘Souls’ of Cities

Agent_Zero. Geoff’s work is so fantastic in this space. Cities, just like ecosystems, are more diverse as they get bigger. Why is that? Well, if you think about it from a biological perspective, there’s just more diversity carrying capacity, right? Like if I’m interested in European soccer and I live in a town of 500 people, there’s just no one to

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“The world is so huge now, it feels endless… When you go into a fantasy universe, it’s smaller, you can focus.”

The Nobel laureate particle physicist Frank Wilczek once said that beauty exists as a dance between opposite forces. First, he said, beauty benefits from symmetry, which he defined as “change without change.” If you rotate a circle, it remains a circle, just as reversing the sides of an equation still reveals a truth (2+2=4, and 4=2+2). But beauty ... See more

So is it helpful to think of a city as a computational kind of—I wouldn’t even say ecology because ecology is a separate metaphor itself—as a computational object or system? Is it a biophysical body? Is it an ecology? Is it a machine? And I think that different policymakers and reformers and other folks who kind of build worlds use different metaph... See more

Applying universal logic gives our experiences a certain weight and our lives a certain order. I assume this is why we’re so drawn to recasting our life stories into tidy narratives and lessons to be shared with others. But in doing this we risk underestimating chaos, nuance, idiosyncrasy, and the occasional dose of self-delusion.