Michael Brooks

Be Very Careful About The Way You Craft Your Narrative

“Notice,” Michael Lewis suggests, “the effect the stories people tell about themselves have on their lives. If you listen to people, if you just sit around and listen, you’ll find there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves.” Some people are always the victim in the stories they... See more

The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more

Emergency preparedness is one of those areas in which a federal government ought to be both proactive and at the national forefront. The reason for this is pretty simple: the capacity to mitigate and manage national disasters varies wildly between provinces and municipalities. When Calgary flooded in 2013, it could rely on its newly built emergency... See more

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding .1 Put simply:

• I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people

... See more

Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly 10 times faster than the average rate of warming after an ice age. Carbon dioxide from human activities is increasing about 250 times faster than... See more

If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.