Kojo

We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as... See more

Because attention is scarce, it is valuable. Every media organization — big or small, reputable or untrustworthy — is using every tactic at hand to engage us.

They need our attention to sell ads and subscriptions, to create value for their brands so we will become loyal consumers of their products.

The one practice I kept was writing. It made the cut because I can’t deny how many good things in my life have come as a result of my putting words out into the world. It also felt like a respite: one area where I wasn’t skeptical of my identity. I’m at my most courageous on the page because interrogating my feelings with words feels justified and

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It’s difficult to create a subscription service to monetize a podcast because there are so many podcasts that deliver lots of great content for free

Instead of a measurable, quantifiable thing that exists independently out in the world, we suggest that intelligence is a label, pinned by humanity onto a bag stuffed with a jumble of independent traits that helped our ancestors thrive.