Society

Amid contention, criticism, and compromise, a divided nation had to present a unified front. It came at a cost.

You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.

The technology that was supposed to make human labour obsolete is, at this moment, more expensive than the humans it was meant to replace.

archived 13 May 2026 22:33:50 UTC

No.406 — Sensing the third horizon ⊗ The public should own half of the big AI companies ⊗ Cities that lost the economic development plot ⊗ The illuminated windows of NYC

No.407 — The frame vs. the framer ⊗ The formula won ⊗ Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own ⊗ World Without End ⊗ It hunts using its shadow

No.408 — Futures studies as a mosaic 2 ⊗ Digital Colonialism ⊗ How the Squamish built Senakw ⊗ Extreme dynamic symmetry

No.409 — The golden age of Bond villains ⊗ Predictions Volume 1 ⊗ GLM-5.2 is a step change ⊗ Earth’s underground fungus network ⊗ Huge collections of Leonardo’s codexes

I bought the most confusing jacket in America.

archived 20 Jun 2026 18:17:43 UTC

In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspape…

Explore the astonishing amount of music available to AI developers.

The rise of machine writing is a great opportunity for literature.

Almost exactly three years ago the Oceangate submarine implosion happened . The disaster came about when a billionaire called Stockton Rush ...

Revisiting "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology” (1992) by Neil Postman.

Matthew Butterick

A new report from Credit Suisse has found that individuals with assets worth more than $50 million, referred to as “ultra-high-net-worth” (UHNW) individuals, spiked to a record high last year.  Cre…

“Xavier owns an apartment that he rents out at a loss of $1 billion/month. Seeing this success, he decides to make financial commitments to construct $850 bi...

pI've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest frie...

For $100, I bought bric-a-brac that explains a nation.

What the most powerful model yet teaches us about the future of knowledge work