culture

Part of the problem with the Lean Startup mindset is that it sees life and work as an optimization problem. The point is to help people live a good life, not just an efficient life. The goal is human flourishing, not convenience. The goal is a good future, not just a technically advanced future.

The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photographs. The uncomfortable, complex, and often difficult intimacy of the paintings characterizes their timeless humanity. The photograph of these paintings is just a collection of symbols, of words in... See more

Every doctrine of inevitability carries a weaponized virus of moral nihilism programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility. Inevitability rhetoric is a cunning fraud designed to render us helpless and passive in the face of implacable forces that are and must always be indifferent to the... See more

To me, what’s happening with teaching reading looks very much like what has happened with teaching writing, namely that we reduce something complex, human, and necessarily messy, to something smaller, discrete and oversimplified so it can be tested and measured, in order to provide comfort that we’re making “progress.”

We are courting a phenomenon... See more

In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major... See more

The Antitrust Division will hopefully respond with “No, your search engine was awesome, but it’s increasingly ad-filled crap. You’re too powerful, you’re too lazy, and America needs some real competition.”

The most frequent complaint I hear about streaming services is that they don’t pay artists fairly. Michael Pelczynski, the former Vice President of Strategy at SoundCloud, took that complaint personally. Over his five years with the streaming service, he helped conceive and implement a novel payment scheme that received much praise.

In an hour-long... See more