Betterment

My favorite movie star wears Chanel. I, too, will wear Chanel. All the cool kids live in Brooklyn. I, too, just moved to Brooklyn. Everyone knows houses

I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me ​an essay​ he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century ... Read more

My story of burnout, and some resources/analysis for spotting, mitigating and treating burnout.

In the opening chapter of War And Peace, Pavlovna sets the stage at an 1805 social gathering in St Petersburg.  The top elite of Russian court life:

When I joined Imprint a little less than a year ago, our deploys were manual, requiring close human attention to complete. Our database migrations were run manually, too. Developing good software is very possible in those circumstances, but it takes a remarkable attention to detail to do it. It was also possible to develop good software using Subversion and developing by ssh’ing into a remote server to edit PHP files, but the goal is making things easy rather than possible.

Why does work seem to fill the space made available to it? And what do the world-record splits of endurance athletes have to teach us about mental effort?

Shortly after the Second World War ended, the United States set up a strict non-fraternization policy. American G.I.’s in occupied Germany were not to

I use four different note-taking apps. Crazy, did you say? Perhaps. Let me explain what note modes are.

I have been a writer long enough to know this in my bones: jargon sucks. It is a crime against writing. It abuses your readers and your listeners. And it is a sure sign you do not know what the hec…

I have been seeing an increasingly prevalent trend of people showing up in online spaces flaunting that they are writing with the assistance of AI. They seem to be proud of this. They shouldn't be.

I recently came across an interesting academic article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. It was titled, ​“The relationships between social media use, time management, ... Read more

Kaeden is a 22-year-old print specialist at a Staples in upstate New York. She started making TikToks about her job because she genuinely loved it. She

Next week, I’m opening registration for my new course Everyday Energy. In the last essay, I discussed why we’re living through a crisis of human energy. Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on how to fix that, with insights drawn from the first month of the three-month curriculum. Energy starts with biology. All human […]

In 1429, an illiterate 17-year old French peasant defined the fate of kings and successfully redefined global power politics. During the Hundred Years’

You do not know what your life is or what you are doing or who you are. Dionysus to Pentheus, Bacchae, Euripides (trans. Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library,

Participants in a meeting of the Japanese OD Network self-organizing in a dialogic container to discuss what they learning from an embodied experience of constraints, Kanzan University, Nagoya, 201…

Dave continues and concludes his posts on anthro-complexity, with an important post that captures my feelings exactly about the role of the facilitator-host-practitioner*: When the practitioner’s c…

To set you up near Theban territory, so they can use their power to control you,without you setting foot inside the state. That's why they want to keep

A screen cap from the video of Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière playing Bach together with tremendous groove. Brian “Ponch” Rivera writes a lot about the OODA loop, learned from h…

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” Kafka "There are other people who develop something new and then

"Damn the Man. Save the Empire." I don't remember the first time I heard that line. I just remember the feeling of hearing it; the specific recognition of something already true inside me, suddenly visible on a screen. Like someone had found the source code and printed it out. Empire Records came out in 1995. I was

We fountain pen people are weird. Every month, around the start of the month, we do a version of the same thing: we make lists. What inks to put in what pens. Rotation schemes, seasonal palettes, e…

It was late into the evening. I wanted to take a break from everything digital. Relaxing by doodling in my notebook. Trying a new grind. Seeing how the metal tip felt on the billowy silky Tomoe Riv…

Reflection Quest — Part 1 of The Watchmaker's Dilemma

Registration for my new course, Everyday Energy opens next week. In anticipation, I’ve written an essay series covering the central philosophy of the course. If you’re just joining us, check out the first essay on why we’re living through a human energy crisis, and an essay on the biological roots of our exhaustion, which we […]

The greater our creations have become, the more hollow they appear in contrast to what was here before us.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s

Back in 1999, the Danish advertising bigwig, Jesper Kunde wrote a book called "Corporate Religion.” His argument was simple. Companies with a genuine

Pundits are saying that Netflix “lost” the bidding for Warner. Actually, they won. They didn’t just win because they got a nearly $3 billion breakup fee. They won because in just …

Work sucks, I know - blink-182