People usually assume that we don’t make interesting, ornate buildings anymore because it got too expensive to pay a bunch of artisans to carve designs into stone and wood.6 But the researcher Samuel Hughes argues that the supply-side story doesn’t hold up: many of the architectural flourishes that look like they have to be done by hand can, in... See more

Standardizing your writing also standardizes your thinking

The decline of deviance is mainly a good thing. Our lives have gotten longer, safer, healthier, and richer. But the rise of mass prosperity and disappearance of everyday dangers has also made trivial risks seem terrifying. So as we tame every frontier of human life, we have to find a way to keep the good kinds of weirdness alive. We need new... See more