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But because it is happening in China, and because the American analysts themselves now treat domestic AI backlash as a strategic vulnerability, they’d

When I speak with people living in China, I find many are similarly worried about AI’s impact on the job market and the tech industry’s exploitative n

So maybe we reframe it. Rather than something that can replace us, AI becomes the thing that gives unadulterated human originality real scarcity value

China’s luxury travel boom runs on emotional value Greater China grew 34.4% in Virtuoso’s 2026 network sales, the fastest growth of any region. “Emoti

In China, emotional value describes the feeling a purchase produces — treated as part of the product itself.

In May, 89 of Douyin’s top 100 animated dramas were AI-made; in Q1 2026, 128,000 short dramas were released (3x all of last year), 95% AI-generated. A

Chinese electric-vehicle makers have lost buyers at home and found new ones in Brazil, Thailand, and the Gulf.

So much of our work moves quickly from event to output, from conversation to summary; the Glossary instead gives these ideas time to settle, in the ho

I like the notion that in the struggle to create something—to bring to fruition a project, a work of art, a company, whatever— sometimes the best stra

I'm a very proud thief and deployer of Stewart Brand's pace layers. Stewart originally used the pace layer model to describe how civilizations hold to

According to a Stanford HAI-cited global survey, Chinese respondents are among the most optimistic in the world about AI, with over 80% saying it will

There is a difference between believing a technology is useful, beneficial, or necessary for society as a whole — that AI will become the fate of the

But because it is happening in China, and because the American analysts themselves now treat domestic AI backlash as a strategic vulnerability, they’d

When I speak with people living in China, I find many are similarly worried about AI’s impact on the job market and the tech industry’s exploitative n

The blurring of these circumstances rattles us. We crave concise explanations even in senseless acts, and prefer that our monsters look like monsters,

In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping i

Humans are fundamentally conflicted. One of the foundational conflicts in psychology is between self-enhancement, or the desire to feel good about who

One of the most durable patterns is loss aversion: our tendency to feel the pain of losing more sharply than the pleasure of an equivalent, or even gr

The blurring of these circumstances rattles us. We crave concise explanations even in senseless acts, and prefer that our monsters look like monsters,

In The Doctrine of Virtue (1797), Immanuel Kant describes the failure to develop our capacities (such as physical skills) as a failure of self-directe

nostalgia is a peculiar combination of a desire for something associated with the past and a belief that it is impossible for that desire to be satisf

It is simply not pleasant to be objectively observed — it’s like seeing a candid photo of yourself online, not smiling or posing, but simply looking t

Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape.

Most of the world’s free time has now been monetized by tech companies. In fact, the monetization of leisure time is how Silicon Valley execs make the

my life was never the same after reading “the only trick of friendship, i think, is to find people who are better than you are. not smarter, not coole

The true friend is the other who hopes you’ll answer the call, who’s willing to challenge you and upset you in order to get you to look at yourself an

A true friend's words do not merely affirm your desires , they tend your becoming . A thought from reading Proverbs 27:9

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the time Ram Dass said: “You have a moral responsibility to leave people alone to suffer the way that they

One core feature of masculinities that can lead to problems “is a fear or avoidance of femininity”, he said. Some research has found that men feel an

As the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym argues in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), unreflective nostalgia ‘breeds monsters’: nationalism, racial suprema

political scientist Robert D. Putnam argues that healthy societies depend on two different kinds of relationships: bonding and bridging social capital

What does it mean that OpenAI bought a media company? That doesn’t feel like a random acquisition. It feels like a sign that trusted voices, archives,

Skill nostalgia is worth cultivating, provided we redirect it. The longing to live as some imagined stonemason, peasant farmer or carpenter can be tur

In a market saturated with options, texture offers something that can be instantly understood, visually shared and physically felt. It turns eating in

to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

In times of uncertainty, another way of thinking, working, and living together is possible — and necessary. There may be a tendency to default to fami

Yes, the gardens have fallen into decay and the flowers are gone. We can mourn that loss. Or we can ask: what kind of work will let us grow them again

This process, Morris says, defines ‘the growth of art: like all growth, it was good and fruitful for awhile; like all fruitful growth, it grew into de

Nervous system capacity is the constraint, not logic. You can explain something to someone a thousand times and it probably will not address the funda

I'm a very proud thief and deployer of Stewart Brand's pace layers. Stewart originally used the pace layer model to describe how civilizations hold to

The post-luxury status symbols I’ve outlined across this series - connected privacy, wasteful time, having children, niche expertise, creating communi

One realization I’ve come to in my money relationship journey is that financial security isn’t a set number. It’s really your relationship with “enoug

To Wang, this is a crisis of meaning. “A lot of people don’t have … hobbies, let alone a personal value system. … When the system stops promising guar

But joy does not just belong to the young, and if we’re lucky, joy finds us across life’s various stages as we age and change. And even under the most

Zhang Jiansheng, a 36-year-old entrepreneur, created an AI-powered tablet that can speak to people with Alzheimer’s disease. He told me about observin

One core feature of masculinities that can lead to problems “is a fear or avoidance of femininity”, he said. Some research has found that men feel an

A growing body of data shows that men engage in higher rates of infidelity and emotional and physical abuse when outpaced by female partners in tradit

One recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that while men in the workplace may view women’s status gains positively, t

It reveals that as a woman in the world, if you don’t decide your needs, they will be decided for you. That without a value system, you can be convinc

If men are this incapable of self-restraint in bed, which, thanks to #MeToo, may now carry consequences, how difficult could it be to defeat them in o

According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR) 2025 profile of homebuyers and sellers, single women now make up 25% of US first-time homebuye