Sarah Owen

a recent study found that well over half of Gen Z have recently started a side hustle to help deal with the impacts of the cost-of-living crisis. 

In a famous paper, ‘Are ideas getting harder to find?’, Nicholas Bloom and collaborators found that research productivity has been falling quite dramatically since the 1970s. Their data suggests that it now takes 18 times as many resources as it did then to work out how to double the number of transistors on a microchip.

“Non-self-coercion” is the conceptual distillation of several converging threads of what you could call productivity criticism (if not outright backlash).

The social app might position itself as the anti-Instagram, but it’s really just another avenue for us to pretend our lives are a highlight reel.

More countries most commonly dream of snakes than any other topic, and it is the most common in more than 1/3 of the countries we surveyed (52 out of 147).

This coercion to extend every adventure as long as possible — the nostalgia continuum — is the connective tissue fastening past experiences to the logic of the “feed,” which cuts the flow of experience down into atomized parts that are readable to tech platforms, enshrines chapters in life to make them rankable, interactable, and presentable to you... See more

Our slow growth is a puzzle. We have generated huge amounts of useful knowledge. We have made it easier and easier to access this knowledge from anywhere in the world. We have Jstor and Google Books to dig through existing knowledge, and easy data analysis with Excel. We can collaborate with people all over the world through Zoom and Slack. And... See more