Ian Vanagas

Perhaps no other civilization, either in antiquity or today, was so fond of legible and governable social realities (than the Roman empire).

In the end, every single person like Nick who votes to deploy their capital into something which doesn’t produce anything beyond capital, is a vote to sit on the sidelines while every single other person works to keep the lights on, or ideally reverse the cycle.

The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutr... See more

All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess.

It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of “conspiracy of silence” surrounding [the] “unspeakable labors” which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small[.]

 We do not create or “have” ideas—if anything is doing the creating or having, it is the ideas themselves.