problems

Exploring the internet together should be like exploring a vast old library with your friends. Wandering down different shelves, skimming the pages that catch your eye, and occasionally one of you hollers in a whispering voice, "come check this out!"

If you have a theory that’s been working pretty well for a while — it made good predictions, it solved real problems, it explained a lot of mysteries — you should stick with it in the face of apparent contradictions, at least for a while. When you hit a snag with a reliable theory, think “maybe it’s complicated” instead of “oh it’s wrong”. It may s... See more

Systemic problems require systemic solutions. We can recognize that technology is critical to our future without replicating the narrow techno-utopianism of the past. From the beginning, a new left techno-optimism must be willing to engage with social justice, politics, and history in a way that past techno-utopians have not.

reating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success.

Over the past two generations, such big questions have fallen increasingly to small, local governments. Why? Because our national governments have collectively failed to build the planetary institutions necessary to solve Earth’s biggest problems, from climate change to pandemics, corruption to poverty. They have also failed to protect democracy wi... See more

Here’s a law of rule-making: you are always in an existential crisis, whether or not you know it.

Like many — dare I say, most — people in their early 20s, I find it hard to shake the feeling that my life is a pinball machine of relationships and opportunities that I’m hurtling through headfirst, knocking over bystanders and crashing into obstacles, unable to stop for long enough to figure out what I’m doing wrong. It is tempting, in this world... See more