Sam Liebeskind

Building a collection on the internet is like building a sandcastle on the beach: eventually the tide washes in and it’s as if it never existed in the first place.

I know that travel is valuable because most knowledge can’t be written down. The most crucial info about a society is how it feels to be there—the rhythms of street life, where and when people eat meals, how gender works. You can read a million things about Japan without knowing the bodily experience of walking around in a truly high-trust society,... See more

Jerry ended up buying 6 ads he could use any time in the next 6 months. And for this privilege, he paid me $500.

But the problems of the speech platforms are not ones of bad actors at the fringes. Rather, they are baked into the incentive structures of the platforms themselves, through the kinds of speech they reward and penalize. The platforms are rotten to the core, inducing us all to become noxious versions of ourselves.

In working so hard to become independent, we forget how much satisfaction we get from the sense that others depend on us, and the meaning we can create by allowing ourselves to be dependent on others—if only we have the courage to let them help us.

I know that grief never ends. When a friend’s loved one dies, put the loved one’s birthday on your calendar. Send them flowers or a card on that date, and never stop doing that.

Above all, Sloman seems to be arguing for thinking through the practical implications of one’s beliefs.

Most issues can be framed in terms of the consequences they produce. Rather than asking whether it is right or wrong to, say, allow people to carry concealed weapons, we can ask what the consequences of such a policy would be. And asserting a cons... See more

It’s possible to provide these services and argue – as the Panthers did – that these services are an alternative to unfair government services. It’s also possible to argue, as Occupy has sometimes done, that these services are an example of what we want governments to provide and a way of pressuring government to do the right thing. This second arg... See more