Sam Liebeskind

In the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) project, a cohort of over 10,000 children in the US was tracked longitudinally. A 2023 analysis of the data revealed that the earlier a child was reading for pleasure, the more this correlated with higher scores on cognitive tests and lower numbers of mental health issues, even after... See more

With a few exceptions, by far the most important component of successful speech communities is that its moderators have faces . A core feature of bulletin boards, comment threads on blogs, and publications is that the boundaries of acceptable speech are enforced not by tech executives, the farcical Facebook Supreme Court,[xii] or distant buildings... See more

When popularity is in the driver’s seat without other values that complement and constrain it, we risk falling into what author and neuroscientist Erik Hoel calls a “gossip trap.” In a gossip trap, raw social power takes precedence over other ways of organizing society, returning us to a world of tribes and clans where reputation management and... See more

Many people have long wondered why the Grateful Dead succeeded in creating a world of Deadheads. It turns out that’s because the people who allocated tickets understood familiar strangers. If you bought a ticket for a Grateful Dead show in Miami, they kept a record of who you were seated near. Then, if you bought a ticket for the Nashville show,... See more

The goal shouldn’t be to recreate offline governance, online, after a period of trial-and-error. Internet-native organizations can’t and shouldn’t operate like geographic governments because they don’t face the same constraints. Once online governance models evolve past a certain point, they should be both different from and superior to offline... See more

“Our towns are where civic culture is created, for better or worse. As this polarized moment in our national politics has shown, civic culture can be poisoned from the top down. But it can be healed and unpolluted from the bottom up and the inside out. How the residents of Tulsa choose to make a civic culture will of course be different from how... See more