Sophie Noel

The more I’m nourished by my work, the more that others have the possibility of being nourished by it too,” says Kening Zhu in “the joy of missing out on platforms.” Using comfortable tools is important if we want to make the work we’re destined to make.

I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to be a garden I tend, snipping back the weeds and nourishing the plants.

It turns out when an app company doesn't care about content and asks an AI to maximize usage the result is a service that incentivizes content that maximizes addictiveness. The type of content that gets created and recommended is not the best content, but the content that elicits the most compulsive and predictable response from the human brain.

If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart.

I believe that art is not a luxury. art is not just nice aesthetics that you buy to make rooms look less depressing. it is not home decor. it is not the third dessert. it is the main course — that creative source which feeds our lives. art is direct access to truth and beauty — a way of seeing that makes life worth living in this difficult,... See more

Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. With such externalities to non-users, standard consumer surplus measures, which take aggregate consumption as given, fail to appropriately capture consumer welfare. We propose an approach to account for these externalities and apply it to estimate consumer welfare... See more

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to let our private language slowly meet the world. What it means to shape something loosely, gently, and with care—so that someone else might pick it up and feel less alone. I don’t think we need to rush that process. But I do believe in creating containers that help us tend to it with intention.