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

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.

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

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

A few years ago, I analyzed a bunch of data and found that all popular forms of art had become “oligopolies”: fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.

This is what economists might call a supply-side explanation: it says that desire for ornament may have remained constant, but that output fell anyway because it became costlier to supply. One of the attractive features of the supply-side explanation is that it makes the stylistic transformation of the twentieth century seem much less mysterious.... See more