Insights

The invention of Female Sexual Interest and Arousal Disorder (SIAD) perfectly illustrates how society sees everything through the lens of male biology. We may not be permanently horny like men, but we are consistent if you tune in: most of us have a surge in libido once a month after we ovulate. What's consistent for a woman is having a few days... See more

When systems are breaking, those excluded stakeholders become the fracture points. The families being priced out organise for access. The communities losing facilities push back. The systemic health problems youth sports are supposed to address accelerate instead of improving.

This isn’t theoretical. The Welsh government embedded this into policy.... See more

This means there are now more news stories than there is actual news. W. David Marx calls this the Parkinson’s Law of Media.

Marx argues that ad-driven platforms financially incentivize all media – and at this point, nearly every company and person is media – to endlessly react and reproduce more media on anything that trends. The tiniest spark of a... See more

THAT WHICH SEEKS ATTENTION CANNOT BE DEFEATED BY GIVING IT ATTENTION

It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe,... See more

People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system ; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with... See more

The sculptor Arturo di Modica ran away from his home in Sicily to go study art in Florence. He later immigrated to the US, working as a mechanic and a hospital technician to support himself while he did his art. Eventually he saved up enough to buy a dilapidated building in lower Manhattan, which he tore it down so he could illegally build his own... See more

compared to their parents and grandparents, teens today are a bunch of goody-two-shoes. For instance, high school students are less than half as likely to drink alcohol as they were in the 1990s: