Writing

Some romanticists feel the urge to knock over the edifice of industrial society intentionally, in order to kick against the seeming shallowness of modern life — to return humanity to a world of toil and struggle, in order to ennoble us. But these dark romantics are rightfully recognized in fiction and public discourse as villains. The heroes of our... See more

I am philosophically inclined to more over less because it’s in more where the real opportunity lies—for exploration, for thrills, and maybe, above all, enlightenment. A digression may be a new flower in bloom. For the writer, writing itself amounts to a sacred act of creation, a white magic, and restricting it, in certain ways, can feel anti-human... See more

It’s intuitive, really, that the meatier essays are rewarded on platforms like Substack and a lengthier, splashier magazine piece can still achieve a degree of virality. As the internet fragments and AI dross proliferates, a hunger sets in among individuals who still want to have a satisfying reading experience. The consumption of much of the conte... See more

You know what you need to do. Strangely, a few people told me variations of this over the course of an extended period of exploration. It was frustrating to hear but directionally true. Put another way: when you (1) have a running list of people you'd like to interview some day in your notes app for the better part of a decade, and (2) the most rec... See more

But speaking descriptively, as a matter of long precedent, what could be more normal, in Silicon Valley, than people weeping on a message board because a UX change has transformed the valence of their addiction?

A good way to get an intuition for the level of complexity here is to ask a model to predict what people will say next in an internal company meeting. They are all very bad at it—you’ll start to realize just how big the universe of context is and how hard it is to marshall the right context at the right time.