Americanism

This idea of progress acknowledges that as soon as we have something, however well it meets our original desires, we see its flaws. ‘Form follows failure’, in the words of civil engineering professor Henry Petroski. Dissatisfaction drives progress. ‘Since nothing is perfect’, writes Petroski, ‘and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not... 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... See more

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don't get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

Theodore Roszak, who coined the term counterculture in his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, later defined its unifying characteristic as ‘the rebellion against certain essential elements of industrial society: the priesthood of technical expertise, the world view of mainstream science and the social dominance of the corporate community’.

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... See more

Donations to the NRA increase 30% the year after a school shooting occurs in a county.