juliana ong

The spacing effect was reported in 1885 by a German psychologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus. He observed that we tend to remember things more effectively, if we spread reviews out over time, instead of studying multiple times in one session.

The companies that win in the context era won’t be the ones with the best algorithms or the most data. They’ll be the ones users actually want to share their lives with – the ones that prove they understand the cultural and personal significance of what they’re being trusted to steward.

The hard problem is earning the right to hold people’s memory. The best way to preserve agency and fight technological fascism is by making the alternative so culturally compelling that people choose it because it serves them better and is more fun.

If there’s one thing that work taught me, it’s that technology only becomes meaningful when culture adopts it.

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, their power gains are, in contrast, perceived as negative and threatening. So threatening, in fact, that the researcher behind the study, Sonya Mishra, observed that they push men toward more... See more

The authors link this to the so-called Tocqueville paradox, which suggests that social progress can, paradoxically, lead to greater frustration.

I’ve come to believe the greater danger is sometimes tolerable and lukewarm mediocrity. This is because catastrophe forces a change, but mediocrity can keep you still. You don’t quit because things are “fine”, but that haze of “fine” can subtly eat away a decade, or even a whole life.

Whether it’s cutting it, braiding it, straightening it, touching it, or not touching it, hair has long held personal, cultural, and spiritual significance to generations of individuals and the communities they inhabit. If the body keeps the score, hair certainly does some record-keeping of its own.