Sasha Tan

loss for words

During the Trump administration, I took on a part time job: keeping up with all the outrages. Every twenty minutes or so I would have to check my phone in case any new outrages had occurred, so that I could...collect them? Make them into a scrapbook? I'm not sure.

I now think of this as super surveillance , tracking every problem in the world as if... See more

Find quality improvement loops, not just productivity loops.

When you ask people to imagine how things could be different, they imagine how things could be better . This doesn’t depend on how we word the question, and it happens in people’s everyday thoughts. Everybody seems to do it; demographics make little difference. Polish people also imagine how things could be better, as do Chinese people answering in... See more

Some problems are like getting a diploma: you work at it for a while, and then you're done forever. Learning how to ride a bike is a classic diploma problem .

But most problems aren’t like that. They’re more like toothbrushing problems : you have to work at them forever until you die. You can’t, as far as I know, just brush your teeth really really... See more

The goal is to make the complicated simple — not the other way around. The best ideas are often expressed as simple ideas. They’ll have power because they’ll feel inevitable.

I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.