Say that Beethoven was the greatest musician of all time. Why has there been no one better in the last ~200 years - despite a vastly larger world population, highly democratized technology for writing and producing music, and a higher share of the population with education, basic nutrition, and other preconditions for becoming a great musician? In... See more

"Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" but for everything. If you told someone fifty years ago about the AI we have access to now, they would have guessed that the ceiling on all sorts of creative output would rise. But where are the better-than-ever essays? Books? Movies? Music?... See more

We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.