essay Oct 9
How Not to Be a Victim of Success
Maria Popova explores how success can ossify our personal narrative, using Rockwell Kent's encounter with a statue from his past as a metaphor for resisting the trap of becoming our own myth.
20 articles rescued from the flames
Noah Smith argues that China's fossil fuel demand has plateaued while their massive solar exports are single-handedly forestalling global climate change, backed by compelling data from Ember Energy.
Legendary trader Vic Niederhoffer shares 11 pieces of life advice, from 'be humble' and 'follow drift upward in stocks' to 'wear a hat' and 'eat fish in high proportion to meat.'
Adam Butler argues we haven't practiced capitalism for 40 years, but rather a 'horrific experiment called neoliberalism' that treats citizens as feedstock for corporate profits instead of serving customer needs.
Cullen Roche's thread on UBI and automation paints a picture of the 'Keynesian Leisure economy'—where we become temporally and monetarily wealthier but socially poorer, with massive disparities in relative leisure.
Scott Alexander's review of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies' reveals how our brains malfunction when faced with scary but uncertain threats that would require life changes. We suddenly become strict scientists demanding proof, applying standards we ignore elsewhere—what he calls 'insane moon epistemology.' This cognitive bias explains why we sleepwalk into obvious disasters while nitpicking warnings about inconvenient possibilities.
Religion doesn't vanish overnight. It fades in sequence: Participation drops first, then Importance, finally Belonging. A study of 111 countries reveals this pattern holds across cultures.
Harris Kupperman runs the numbers on AI capital expenditure and finds a terrifying gap: the industry needs $480 billion in revenue just to cover 2025 investments, but there simply aren't enough paying customers to make it work.
As AI makes writing effortless, we face an uncomfortable question: if we stop wrestling with words ourselves, do we lose the ability to think deeply? Michael Dean argues that writing isn't just communication—it's how we earn back our cognitive agency.
Colin Lewis argues that AI overspending isn't a bug but a feature—bubbles are civilization's way of coordinating massive resources around transformative technologies, turning irrational exuberance into innovation breakthroughs.
Three brilliant writers circle the same truth from different angles: Henrik Karlsson on sacrifice, Sherry Ning on values as a filter for spending, and Ian Leslie on buying happiness. Together, they reveal why what we think we want rarely matches what we actually need.
David Deming, Harvard's new Dean, pushes back against AI job apocalypse fears, arguing that CEOs use AI as a convenient scapegoat and that technological disruption historically creates opportunities for the educated elite.
Alex connects David Graeber's bullshit jobs theory with AI disruption, arguing that while meaningless corporate work persists, it's increasingly becoming just a paycheck to fund real entrepreneurial work—and AI is removing the entry-level rungs that once led to corporate careers.
James O'Sullivan argues that social media has transformed from a discovery tool into a distraction machine, where billions of users scroll through AI-generated slop not for information but for 'ambient dissociation.'
Stanford's Fei-Fei Li argues that AGI is impossible with text-only LLMs, making the case that spatial intelligence—understanding and reasoning about the 3D world—is fundamental to true AI. Her evolutionary perspective on why vision predates and underlies intelligence offers a compelling counter-narrative to the current text-obsessed AI landscape.
Branko Milanović's sobering reflection from a Columbia panel on democracy asks the uncomfortable question: what if people are using democracy to elect undemocratic leaders, and what if that's not a bug but a feature?
Joseph Heath explains how the brightest Marxist philosophers of the 1980s quietly became liberals—not because capitalism won, but because they stripped away Marx's theoretical baggage and found John Rawls had already built better tools for critiquing inequality.
Neal Stephenson challenges the sacred writing rule 'show don't tell,' arguing that skilled exposition can move plot faster and engage broader audiences than pure dramatization.