palimpsest

We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.

Our lives are too sacred to be spent pretending that meaningless work is meaningful.

But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions —and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.

She had gone to the machine to talk about the callow and exploitative dynamics of commodified attention capture—only to discover, in the system’s sweet solicitude, a kind of pure attention she had perhaps never known. Who has? For philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the capacity to give true attention to another being lies at the... See more

“Would you trade your own messy, dynamic human attention for something more stable and neutral, or do you think the ‘messiness’ is part of what makes it meaningful?”

The question is no longer whether we can write such books; they can be written endlessly, for us. The question is, do we want to read them?

1. I didn’t pick a niche . I have often admired and envied people who have their one thing —whether it’s literature, urban planning, art history, sociology, mathematics, architecture, software—because I have never been able to commit like that. The usual advice is to “niche down” if you want to build an audience for your newsletter, but trying to

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