Jay Matthews

The things that will survive are the things that are already in some sense endless. The sea; the night; the word. Things with deep fathoms of darkness in them.

Creating online, in a counter-intuitive way, is a way to disconnect with the very-online world we live in and a way to reconnect with yourself.

Alright, I thought. Writing is about working harder and faster than everyone else. It’s about overwhelming the world with the sheer volume of words you can churn out. It’s about hitting wordcounts and it’s definitely about making fun of anyone that mentions “writer’s block.” ... I loved writing and I was doing what they said you have to do if you... See more

Get transported on a stunningly rendered, sci-fi safari through Planet City: an imaginary metropolis of 10 billion people, from the brain of director and architect Liam Young. Explore the potential outcomes of an urban space designed to house the entire population of the earth — and imagine answers to what is possible, and what is sustainable, for... See more

Perhaps if one is pessimistic about the future, it is that much more important to embrace Future Self-Continuity, however paradoxically, because acting with the interests of the future in mind may the best way to make a future worth living in.

This is why science, as a mode of inquiry, is fundamentally antithetical to all monolithic intellectual systems. In a beautiful essay, Feynman (1999) talks about the hard-won "freedom to doubt." It was born of a long and brutal struggle, and is essential to a functioning democracy. Intellectuals have a solemn duty to doubt, and to teach doubt.... See more

Sixteen Reasons Other Than Prediction to Build Models But, more to the point, I can quickly think of 16 reasons other than prediction (at least in this bald sense) to build a model. In the space afforded, I cannot discuss all of these, and some have been treated en passant above. But, off the top of my head, and in no particular order, such... See more