Betterment

A meditation on the shifting expectations society places on us, how our identity is a negotiation with our environment, and how our ideas of the world shape our reality.

My wife and I have an ongoing debate about whether I take too many photos. Or, more to the point, whether I keep too many of the photos I take. The matter has come to a head lately because our photo account just filled to 89% capacity. We get warnings all the time now. I […]

My mother died at the end of June 2024, a few months after my father. They lived the last 39 years of their lives in a tidy but full house, surrounded by books, photos, treasures, and memories of travels. It took a year and a half to transform the house from a cozy den of […]

Progress as a non-stationary argument

Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

Credit: Google DeepMind / Unsplash For years, I’ve known intellectually that my best days aren’t my busiest days. That sustainable productivity requires balancing multiple priorities. T…

On the lie that the future is fixed

Quarterly Review of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Washington D.C.

Paying homage to the long-dead Transcendentalist, some people are building full-scale replicas of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden cabin.

Mike Macdonald doesn’t say much, but what he said mattered.

Define what good looks like in engineering teams. Learn how clear standards, templates, and automation reduce ambiguity and scale execution quality.

Nobody signs up for monotony. It just… happens. One. Habit. At. A. Time. The same dark roast, one splash of milk, lukewarm by the second sip. The same playlist titled “Workout Jams” at the gym. The…

So you want to be a millionaire. Easy. Just put $X dollars a day into a low-cost index fund. Repeat every day for a few decades. That’s it. Seriously.

Explore 1100+ failed startups and learn from $40B+ in burned venture capital. Discover why they failed, their market potential, and how to rebuild them with today's tech

Don’t let the curse of the blinking cursor make you succumb to the synthetic machine. The God of Lies ™ confabulates nouns, verbs, and adjectives with statistical precision. Words mean things and humans imbue them with meaning. Writing is the evil twin of thinking.

On Cormac McCarthy, John Grady Cole, and what it means to practice a craft while the world moves on without you.

Rewriting notes isn’t wasted effort or a mere maintenance task. It is itself part of writing-to-think, with the goal to improve clarity of thought. Separate this from writing-to-communicate to avoid self-censorship. These are different mental modes.

Focus on ideas, and how to develop them, so that not only your notes become good, but you become more skilled at knowledge cultivation.

Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.

It’s difficult to write directions. A user interface, a map or a recipe all require empathy. That’s because the person writing it knows something the reader doesn’t. In fact, that…

1960 article by theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Eugene Wigner

In 1871, George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Davis) published “Middlemarch" an 800-page masterpiece about a young woman whose grand plans all fell apart.

There’s a sharp little French slang word, “Bobo.” It’s short for “Bourgeoise Boheme” i.e the lifestyle that combines both the sexy “bohemian” bit about

There’s a phenomenon you’ll see a lot of on Instagram: a talented artist posting a video of herself working on a magnificent piece she’s been hammering

Our cultural fabric is unraveling before our very eyes. The question is: what is it that keeps a culture together in the first place? Strong cultures

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

"Stoicism is a philosophy of life that suggests that the best way to live a human life is to ask yourself what kind of a living organism human beings are."

The temporality of implementation uncertainty in software

What would you work on if doing the work felt easy?