Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
“I was viewed as smart, as a nerd, not as a good guy or a bad guy,” said Sam. “Not really viewed as a person. Smart and inoffensive and maybe not all that human.” Worse, he didn’t totally disagree with his classmates’ assessment. “I didn’t feel misunderstood. I felt like their half-assed guesses were in the right ballpark.”
Michael Lewis • Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
convictions
Gary Gutting • What Philosophy Can Do
Not long after arriving at George Mason, Cowen read “Sexual Personae”by Camille Paglia, a buccaneering polemic about Western art across millennia. Although he didn’t agree with Paglia’s ideas, he saw this was the kind of book he wanted to write. Within months he was drafting a lively, popular history of markets and high culture. In 2003 he and Taba... See more
archive.ph • Tyler Cowen, the Man Who Wants to Know Everything
The more we try to learn and understand the lives being led by other people—the more we search for a golden mean of empathy—the less we will find it permissible to treat them with cruelty.
Michael Schur • How to Be Perfect
One of the wildest moments of this conversation for me was when I made a comment that I thought was just a universally believed truth about the post-platform internet: that people these days prefer individuals to brands. And then Nilay told me, “No, that’s wrong. It’s not people who are doing that; it’s the systems that deliver content to people” —... See more
Nilay Patel • NilayPatel tells Decoder guest host Hank Green why blogs are still great
To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.
David Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
What desires does the use of this technology dissipate?
Ezra Klein • 41 Questions For The Technologies We Use, and That Use Us
In 2011 Cowen published a digital pamphlet in which he argued that since the 1973 oil-price shock, America had experienced a hidden crisis of lost growth that would be resolved only by the development of new technology. He called this period the “Great Stagnation”, and he proposed a cultural solution rather than an economic one: raise the social st... See more