Americanism

People often, for example, oppose the actions and belief systems of billionaires, but take jobs at companies that increase the power and influence of those same billionaires. It’s not because these job-seekers are bad people, but because we are all operating in a system that makes aligning our values and our everyday lives seem impossible.

This sepa... See more

Cognitive load is like playing an iterated game of diminishing returns. Every choice—every click, every scroll—saps a little more of your mental energy. By the time you’re 20 decisions deep, your ability to make intentional choices is shot. It’s not that you’ve lost the game; you’ve been worn down by it.

In behavioral economics, this is known as dec... See more

To win one of these coveted positions, then, you need to do everything exactly right from your freshman year of high school onward: get good grades, garner strong recommendations, work in the right labs, publish papers in prestigious places, never make anybody mad, and never take a detour or a break. (I occasionally get emails from high schoolers b... See more

Risk is expensive, and it does not figure into P&L. When the pressure is to show YoY growth on the quarterly basis, as is the case of the publicly traded companies, or when expectation is to deliver wild returns in case of PE-backed ones, no one wants to make anything remotely surprising or different. Prada is able to put forward fearless creativit... See more