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I’m not sure anyone ever seriously expected Facebook, Google, or eBay to be a buyer of these types of businesses, but they haven’t been. Amazon and Walmart haven’t been active, either. Target has been focused on launching new private-label brands. Nike hasn’t done a DTC roll-up. Shopify, which now powers almost 2 million e-commerce merchants,... See more

As Matt Clancey points out that “the benefits of knowledge spillovers from being physically close to other knowledge workers have been falling and may no longer exist in many domains of knowledge.” This is a controversial claim, but Clancey provides a detailed review of multiple studies that address this matter from different directions.

What happens in this scenario is that a few giants, not just Spotify, ultimately become dominant vertically integrated podcast, distribution and advertising platforms. These will then cut deals with each other, and cartelize the industry into a land of giants, much as Disney is doing in Hollywood. (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see these two... See more

People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

That passive mass audience on which so many political and economic institutions depended had itself unbundled, disaggregated, fragmented into what I call vital communities: groups of wildly disparate size gathered organically around a shared interest or theme.

Ever since I started working on this article, a chart has been haunting me. It plots the percentage of people living alone in a country against that nation’s GDP. There’s a strong correlation. Nations where a fifth of the people live alone, like Denmark and Finland, are a lot richer than nations where almost no one lives alone, like the ones in... See more

Author E.B. White once captured the essence of why. “I wake up in the morning unsure of whether I want to savor the world or save the world,” White said , “This makes it hard to plan the day.”