Santi

I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to be a garden I tend, snipping back the weeds and nourishing the plants.

It is primarily we intellectuals and elites who culture shop, picking and choosing what works best for us. That's true in Europe and the US, where each group of elites is inoculated from the least admirable qualities. Well-to-do Americans can escape the banal landscapes, either through travel or by living in the exclusive US neighborhoods that... See more

Social networks became “social media,” which, at first, meant receiving content from people you chose to hear from. But in the quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for attention. And it turns out, for most people, your friends aren’t as entertaining as (god forbid)... See more

These small businesses, which are often run out of someone's home, owned by a family who are also the only employees, are what distinguishes Japan from all other developed nations, making life in it a notch above the rest. While the most obvious of these are restaurants (izakayas, monjayaki-yas, soba-yas, etc.), others are focused on specialized... See more