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Narcissus, despite the linguistic bait-and-switch, isn’t really a story about vanity. The name Narcissus actually shares its root with the Greek narkē , which is where we get narcosis , aka, numbness. In ancient usage, it referred to the kind of paralysis induced by a drug or a shock, like the feeling of being frozen in place. Seen this way,... See more

Indra’s Net is a concept in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. It’s the idea of everything that arose dependently, all things, hanging together and depending on one another, with no true ontological essence. Each of the jewels of Indra’s Net is said to contain the entirety, fractal, and there is no unfurling or separation of the parts from one another.... See more

Military technologies and crowd-control techniques tested in other countries always get deployed on protestors in the US in the decades that follow. We know this on some level—hence the trope in apocalypse films wherein the contagion or zombies or whatever comes and finds the survivalist homesteaders, however complete and pure their efforts at... See more

We are not the first to become a mass exploitable class but we are perhaps the least resilient population to be subjected to such conditions, because we have been taught—and ultimately live in a material reality which reinforces—that nothing matters but ourselves. We have no liberation theology.)

Find some topic you care about. Just one. Resist the temptation to have takes on everything else. Let the discourse rage without you while you spend weeks or months actually understanding something. Read books about it, not takes. Talk to experts, not pundits. Follow the evidence where it leads, even when it's uncomfortable. Change your mind when... See more

It’s interesting, he writes, to see what happens when scores are introduced into activities where they’ve previously been absent. He finds, for instance, that scorekeeping has pushed skateboarders to focus more on obvious, badass tricks than on “steeze,” or stylish ease, which is more difficult to quantify. He suggests that the advent of scores for... See more

The problem is that metrics are seductive. Once something is being ranked, it becomes almost impossible to get that ranking out of your head. Over time, this can lead to what C. Thi Nguyen calls “value capture.” In “The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game,” Nguyen writes that “value capture occurs when you get your values from some... See more