Severin Matusek

A number of recent studies, while small in scale, have suggested that we grieve the loss of friction that comes from skipping over time-intensive or frustrating tasks, particularly in creative scenarios.

“It’s unsurprising that ketamine has taken over as the ‘drug of choice’ for young people, because of its disassociating effects, which allow you to be close to one another, while being isolated in your individual k-holes. It also makes it harder to look at your phone.” Plus, let’s face it, it’s hard to look all cool and serious while K-holing.

Encampments are not an uncommon sight in Berkeley, but on my visits to Sproul Hall I was struck, nonetheless, by the tents, and what they seemed to evoke.

Fringe ideas are no longer fanciful theories but have become real political projects.

When I first saw this, I thought “Did anyone read this?” That’s always the question when encountering something that you think is god awful. But in the AI era, I found myself asking a follow-up question: “Did anyone write this?”

There is a competition going on for authority online — not just authority in a particular subject matter, like politics or finance, but the authority to provide a comprehensive view of what matters on the internet, pointing out what to pay to attention to.

From Asparouhova’s perspective, the lesson we should draw is not that bad ideas should in fact be suppressed but that good ideas require the trussing of sturdy, credible institutions—structures that might withstand the countervailing urge to raze everything to the ground.

A vision for building a society that looks beyond money and toward maximizing the values that make life worth living, from the cofounder of Kickstarter.