looking towards 2026

When survival and gain become the only legible orientations, the common world - as Arendt calls it - goes untended.

Philosopher Martin Buber speaks of two types of relationships with the world around us. There is ‘I and Thou’, where we encounter other beings as connected, interwoven and relational to our own lives. Then there’s ‘I and It’, where beings are othered as objects, detached from ourselves and something to be used for our own ends. The voyeuristic... See more

Not by optimizing for optionality—that cult of keeping doors open that has dominated career discourse for far too long—but by doing the opposite. By closing doors. By choosing the one thing that makes you come alive, and going so deep into it that joy and intensity become indistinguishable. Liu won because she stopped optimizing and started wanting... See more

Part of why people are unsure of where to walk is that AI is severing the deepest identity loop in the Western world: who you are equals what you do for money.

The Protestant work ethic was a load-bearing wall for the Western psyche. We are dismantling it without a blueprint for what comes next.

For centuries, the equation was simple. You work. You... See more

The belief that doing takes more resources than deciding what to do has been the default operating mode for basically all of human life. The how has always been so expensive that the what barely matters. You didn’t need to be good at wishing because you were never going to get most of what you wished for anyway. That’s why ‘default to action’ (vs

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Anderson Cooper asks the most prolific music producer alive what, exactly, he does in the studio. Rubin can’t play an instrument. He has no formal training, doesn’t read music, and never touches the boards.

His answer: I know what I like and what I don’t like, and I’m decisive about what I like and what I don’t like.

That’s it. That’s the whole job... See more

One answer currently bubbling up is Collective Memory, a new live-posting platform that tries to pull the internet back into the real world. The rules are deliberately simple: you can’t upload from your camera roll, you can’t use filters and you can only post what you’re seeing right now. Picking up where BeReal dropped off, every piece of content... See more