Archive

In his Grub Street Diet, New Yorker investigative journalist Ronan Farrow spends the week in Los Angeles meeting with sources, relaxing with Korean barbecue, and having complicated feelings about green juice.

If there’s one quote that’s particularly popular in management circles, it’s “what gets measured gets managed”—often misattributed to famous management consultant Peter Drucker. First, Drucker never said this; second, he actually didn’t believe such a thing; third, the idea is flawed. A long game of telephone The idea probably originated from a paper published in ... Read More

On-Chain Generative Art

In this wide-ranging essay, the author argues that pretending to be above and beyond politics is by itself a political position; in adopting it, one has aligned with the state and sided with the powerful.

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

All systems have rules. A system’s rules can be used as a starting point to work against. Jootsing stands for “Jumping Out Of The System”.

When bad things repeatedly happen, we may come to think they are unavoidable. And when we feel like we have no agency over our situation, we may begin to behave in a helpless way. Learned helplessness is a mental state that occurs after someone has experienced a stressful situation so many times, they believe they ... Read More

An Engineering Argument for Basic Income - Utilizing fault-tolerant design in critical life support systems

Well I'm in the working world again. I've found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it's returning to normal after my nine months of traveling. Because I had been living quite a different lifestyle while I was away, this sudden transition to 9-to-5 existence has exposed something about it that I overlooked before.

I know I’m not alone when I say that I can feel the gap between my world and my parents’ world widening. They barely know what memes and influencers are — and yet, our culture is being completely re-shaped by them. How do reality bubbles get created and distorted, and how might we begin to bridge the divides between them?

Ursula K. Le Guin The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction 1986

International City Gaming Conference 2017 keynote

As a neuroscience student, I need to read lots of research papers. Despite the subscriptions my university pays for in order for students to have access to most scientific journals, I sometimes hit a paywall which I can’t get around without paying quite a bit of money, just to access one article. Lucky for me ... Read More

After more than a decade of writing life-changing advice, I know when to move on. Here’s what else I learned

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is getting a lot of attention these days, thanks in large part to the excellent work of Stephanie Kelton and Nathan Tankus, two of the movement’s most effective communicators. Over the past few weeks a number of people inspired by their work have asked me whether there i

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week announced the arrest of a 55-year-old Latvian woman who’s alleged to have worked as a programmer for Trickbot, a malware-as-a-service platform responsible for infecting millions of computers and seeding many of those…

Yesterday, Silicon Valley Analyst Jeremiah Owyang vaguely reported that executives are scared of their employees “working part-time (but paid full salary)” and “even working on side hustle startups, while on a full-time salary,” a truly terrifying prospect that has chilled me to the bone.

If you went to a traditional school, chances are you were told to avoid distractions at all cost: keep your eyes on the teacher, take copious notes, don’t fidget on your chair, and don’t let your mind wander. As adults, we have internalised this mantra and seek to be hyperfocused on our work. But our ... Read More

Our desire to be more productive can turn into a harmful addiction to productivity content: a phenomenon known as productivity porn.

You can ask me anything. There will be no moderator. This will be between you and me. Let's see what happens. Much love, Nick

The wrong framing When I think about the history of sustainable design, I see marketing everywhere. Whether you consider Enzo Mari’s communist ‘Autoprogettazione’ (1974) or Victor Papanek’s Nomadic Furniture (1971) (the better looking cousins to IKEA (first store in 1958)), it doesn’t matter. “DIY” remains a niche experience that is more wasteful than buying vintage […]

There’s a need to reconnect the digital to the physical, from minerals and energy to the physical infrastructure that powers the internet. We have to repurpose our digital design processes to consider and reflect these ecological needs, instead of optimising only for business and growth objectives, to achieve more transactions, interactions and attention.  One of […]

Depending on whom you ask, the use of the active voice over the passive is arguably the most fundamental writer’s maxim, thought to lend we...

GitHub notifications without stress

If coronavirus is a dress rehearsal for the crises to come, Silicon Valley has proved itself worse than useless.

Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.