Matthew Irving

I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

I’ll define negativity bias creep here as the tendency of ideological media—or news media with a point of view—to recognize over time that audiences prefer negative stories to positive stories and thus, in an attempt to reflect audience preferences, to become more negative over time.

Many young people, blocked from ownership, are funneling their spare cash toward meme stocks, meme coins, and gambling

In my essay “Everything Is Television,” I wrote that all media are converging toward the same flow of video. Social media is becoming less about keeping up with friends and more about watching short-form videos made by strangers—i.e., television. Podcasts are becoming less about listening to Internet radio and more about watching YouTube talk... See more

For the American Prospect, Paul Starr documents the collapse of cultural affordability under Baumol, pointing out that “public elementary and secondary education, public libraries, land grant colleges with low tuition, and the 20th century’s mass media—including free, over-the-air radio and television” used to be... free. Or at least heavily... See more

“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.”

The market’s bottomless appetite for tech debt looks like it might finally be running up against natural constraints — not necessarily because investors have lost faith, but because their own balance sheets simply can’t stretch forever.