Nate Stranzl

Yet there’s a bit of wisdom from an old baseball Hall of Famer, Bob Feller, that I’ve sought to follow, at least in my thirties. Feller, known for relentlessly signing baseballs and talking up his exploits, used to tell reporters—or anyone who’d listen, really—that he was the greatest ever. If you’re not going to promote yourself, he asked, who wil... See more

As scale increases, individuals become more abstract, and humanity and empathy are lost. This happens acutely when the algorithm decides to laser-beam a small shop with a hundred-million views. If you cast a net to that many people, a vast chunk of them will not engage in good faith, let alone take a second to consider the feelings of residents or ... See more

Why didn’t I see that it would be easy to fund essay writing in this way? It was, as I’ve said, partly a lack of imagination, partly a fear of looking stupid. But it was also that my thinking was bundled. I had conflated “being a writer” with “having a publisher” and “getting a salary from my writing.” These are not the same thing.

Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I ... See more