Sam Liebeskind

If democracy is this challenge of people coming together to figure out the kind of shared lives they want to forge, then the behaviors that they use to negotiate difference are going to flow from the commitments they have to each other. So when my husband and I fight, we fight like we want to stay married. We may deeply disagree about things, but... See more

I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.

The lack of context isn’t a problem here, because Strayed’s not actually telling the asker whether or not he should have kids. She’s offering the wisdom of her own life. She’s not telling the asker what to do so much as inviting them to ask themselves some questions (instead of her).

When you have a densely connected network like that, not only are the friendships more rewarding, but everyone else also becomes more important to each other for mutual support, like Metcalfe’s Law. A densely layered quilt is much stronger than a seam sewn by a single string.

I was surrounded by peace nerds talking about inclusion and plurality, but I have to confess, sometimes the event didn’t feel very inclusive or plural. Speakers often talked with the unstated assumption that left-ish politics are obviously correct. At times I felt the uncomfortable dissonance of being around a group of people explicitly talking... See more

WhatsApp initially achieved that global dominance in large part by doing just one thing very well: enabling cheap, private, and reliable messaging on almost any phone, almost anywhere in the world. But in the decade since Meta acquired WhatsApp for an eye-watering $22 billion in 2014, the app has been transformed from a narrowly focused utilitarian... See more

Infrastructure is public in nature even when it isn't publicly owned and operated. However, while public actors have a key role to play, I believe that a successful digital sovereignty strategy will overall end up relying more on private and commons actors. The first role that public actors have here is to disperse power and to help coordinate the... See more