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One last thing. When I took this topic on, I decided to do my best to force humility and open-mindedness on myself, even in places we’re all terrible at being humble, like politics. It’s amazing how much intellectual progress you can make when that’s your starting point, and working on this post has felt like an awakening in more than one area. So ... See more

When you’re a single cell in the body of a giant, it’s hard to understand what the giant’s doing, or why it is the way it is, because you can’t really zoom out and look at the whole thing all at once. But we do our best.

With so many non-controversial topics to write about, why take on something so loaded and risk alienating a ton of readers? I listened to people’s warnings, and I thought about moving on to something else, but then I was like, “Wait what? I live inside a giant and the giant is having a six-year-old meltdown in the grocery store candy section and th... See more

So part of what I’ve spent three years working on is a new language we can use to think and talk about our societies and the people inside of them. In typical Wait But Why form, the language is full of new terms and metaphors and, of course, lots and lots of badly drawn pictures. It all amounts to a new lens. Looking through this lens out at the wo... See more

Hi. I’m Tim. I’m a single cell in society’s body. U.S. society, to be specific.

Individual humans grow older as they age—but it kind of seems like the giant human I live in has been getting more childish each year that goes by.

As a writer and a generally thinky person, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about the society I live in, and societies in general. I’ve always imagined society as a kind of giant human—a living organism like each of us, only much bigger.

Sometimes, certain topics become hard to talk about because our conversations get stuck in a rut. We hear the same arguments, using the same wording, again and again, until we become numb to them. When the words we use become too loaded with historical baggage, they stop being useful for communication. That’s what I think may be going on here. We’r... See more