Tom White

When you train people to look steadily at what’s beautiful, you’re telling them that some things are worth revering. And once reverence enters, relativism doesn’t stand a chance.

The truth that applies to many fields, which can frustrate some as much as it energizes others, is that the person who tells the most compelling story wins. Not who has the best idea, or the right answer. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads.Harari recently said about writing Sapiens:I thought,... See more

Those interested in diplomacy will read this book with pleasure and profit. And indulge its idiosyncrasies. Cooper’s analytical skill lies in reconstructing complex chains of events; his synthetic talent, in making sense of it all. The latter was pronounced in his earlier work, Breaking. Here he adds analysis. His is an intellectual apparatus... See more

Forward Deployed Engineers were pioneered by Palantir: instead of throwing software over the wall and hoping for adoption, you put engineers on the ground who understand the customer’s problems and can bridge the gap between what the product does and what the customer needs.

It’s been copied across the industry. And it works.

But I wonder if we’ve... See more

This allows us to pop the algorithmic bubbles—the weapons of math destruction—used by the Twitters, Facebooks, Googles of the world to lull us to sleep. It shuts off the intermittent dopamine drip to which we have become tethered and addicted.Though I do not lead a life so interesting to write about each and every day (partly why this newsletter... See more

Technology is changing one of the most powerful forces in shaping society: ambition. What the most ambitious people choose to do with their lives has a profound impact on society, the economy and culture. It’s changing, fast.First, that digital technology is the most recent in a series of ‘technologies of ambition’ that have enabled ambitious... See more

A great deal has been written about what constitutes Venture Capital and what does not (including by this very author) in these seventy years. Though many different things to many different people, Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dictum in Jacobellis v. Ohio works for our purposes:I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I... See more