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When startups start taking off, the founders usually can't tell what's changed. It's some combination of all the random things they did to make it ta

Most AI backlash is economic anxiety coated in a veneer of social justice. Alfalfa farming consumes 19 times the water that data centers do; there’s n

“Diffusion lag” reflects a lack of product-market fit. Even AI optimists are still hitting practical roadblocks. That’s why detailed case studies are

Here are some things I’ve asked chatgpt recently: “why is Toblerone so popular at airport duty-free stores?” “give me a recipe for a chickpea tagine

Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, the self-described de-extinction company behind the woolly mammoth and thylacine, today announced that it is spinni

“leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in on

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Instead, Professor Kahneman favored an alternative that he termed “adversarial collaboration.” When people who disagree work together to test a hypoth

Advice I would give to a college freshman: These next four years, one of your main goals should be to figure out how not to have the rest of your lif

When I look at a lot of what I’ve been writing for the last few years it’s infrequent and too often about things and not enough of what I think about

When we die we always leave things unfinished.

Novelist Charles Kingsley on happiness: “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us hap

And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed hu

In large part this is because education, like most social systems, is slow to adapt, iterate, and evolve to be relevant for changing times. The glacia

generative AI is but the latest in a line of innovations that draws attention to the flaws of the modern education system, leaving us to question how

The humanities, rightly understood, are the things that technology cannot take away or substitute for. Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way