("JP")

There are only two factors that limit the potential for interesting communities to arise: the availability of people searching for new communities to join, and the ability for those people to gather and do interesting things together. Both of these things are on the rise.

I’m not sure how safe Rocinha would have been if I had wandered there on my own. But from the little that I’ve seen, they are rich in culture and hold strong community values.

Living in New York City, the city is also densely packed, yet we exist independently in our own spaces and spend a lifetime not knowing our immediate neighbors. While in... See more

“And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You... See more

Still, I think something more fundamental has been lost for all of us as social media has evolved. It’s harder to find the spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a few giant companies have carved for us... See more

Innovating within an existing platform is always a challenge, because as media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued decades ago, ‘the medium is the message’. TikTok and Twitter/X have short-form content built into the design of the platform, which prevents depth. As I explore in The Bigger Picture, this also leads to what philosopher C. Thi Nguyen... See more

On what Nikki Jean sees in the kids who attend the camps

Nikki Jean: “The most beautiful thing to see is the ‘aha moment’ where they grasp the interconnectivity between something as intangible as the music they love and something as tangible as the places they live.

“Rap has structure. The way you put together a song has a structure. And it's very... See more

The reason you aren’t living in the present, when all is said and done, is because you don’t feel the present living in you.