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On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness.

That enthusiasm proved contagious. You don’t need to care about the difference between 2.76:1 and 1.90:1 to feel it in your bones when the screen widens during the film’s climactic siege, and you sure as hell don’t need to care about it in order to appreciate a director making so earnest an appeal to our attention at a time when most studio movies feel like they were made with the same casual indifference that audiences have been conditioned to watch them.

While Coogler’s first original project was always going to command a certain amount of hype, the decision to lead with its importance to him galvanized people around the notion that “Sinners” was more than just another movie they could watch at home in three weeks (rave reviews from basically every critic in the country didn’t hurt either).

Last Thursday night, moviegoers across this godforsaken land rabidly made their way to the nearest multiplex — or pilgrimaged across state lines to the closest theater capable of projecting 15-Perf IMAX 70mm film — in order to see early screenings of the first original blockbuster from a gifted filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to put a strong personal stamp on increasingly generic Hollywood franchises. At that very same time, halfway around the world, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and chief creative officer Dave Filoni took the stage at Star Wars Celebration 2025 in Chiba, Japan to announce that the next chapter of cinema’s most iconic saga would be directed by a filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to be friends with Ryan Reynolds. Related Stories ‘Sinners’ Took a Nice Bite Out of a Random Tuesday at the Box Office Ryan Coogler Thanks Over 40 ‘Cinematic Influences’ Who Inspired ‘Sinners,’ Including Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and Brian De Palma The movie business has always been held aloft by the tension between genuine pop artistry and mass-produced slop, two separate but hopelessly entwined ambitions that have proven even harder to balance than the Force. While both have their value, those values are in a constant state of flux, and they can only be determined with any real accuracy by measuring the difference between them. Seldom has that difference ever seemed more dramatic than it did at the fateful moment when “Sinners” mania overlapped with the reveal of “Star Wars: Starfighter.”  On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness. While “Sinners” was offering one audience something they had never seen before, “Star Wars: Starfighter” was pitching a different audience a movie so generic and familiar that even its title sounds like it’s repeating itself.  Of course, “Sinners” has the advantage of being a finished product that people have seen and loved, whereas “Star Wars: Starfighter” is still just a graphic designed to rile up the fanbase and appease whatever portion of Disney shareholders have already forgotten the great “Lightyear” debacle of 2022. (Just to be clear, this isn’t Starfighter the ship. This is the origin story of the human Starfighter that the ship is based on.) And, while anything’s possible, I’m not suggesting that Coogler’s movie will ultimately outgross the first “Star Wars” feature that promises to pick up from the saga where “Episode IX” left off.  All the same, the enthusiasm gap between these two projects — the reality of one, and the promise of another — has been tellingly immense. So far as the national water cooler is concerned, “Sinners” has ousted the Chicken Jockey as the biggest film story of the year, and stoked the rare kind of excitement that leads to $8.6 million Tuesdays and people scalping IMAX tickets on eBay. It’s also cemented Coogler’s status as a brand unto himself, and proved that Warner Bros. doesn’t have to sell its soul to “A Minecraft Movie” in order to stave off financial ruin. Conversely, there may not be a single person on Earth who’s more optimistic about the future of the galaxy far, far away now that a significant portion of its fate has been entrusted to the director of “The Adam Project.” The serendipitous timing of these announcements was a bit on the nose. You couldn’t have scripted a better way of confirming the reality that studios have been trying to prevent ever since they offered mid-budget movies as a blood sacrifice at the altar of mega-tentpole franchises: Mediocrity is losing its grip on the public imagination. (Cookie-cutter as “A Minecraft Movie” might have been in the end, I maintain that getting the “Napoleon Dynamite” guy to adapt a plotless video game about blocks was less of a slam-dunk than it seems, and the Chicken Jockey phenomenon speaks to a degree of novelty that was missing from recent short-fallers like “Captain America: Brave New World.”)  ‘Free Guy’Fox/Disney I trust that Levy is a nice guy, and I suppose it’s possible that the sheer gravity of “Star Wars” might inspire the “Free Guy” auteur to up his game (I’d entertain the argument that both “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” are the best movies their respective directors have ever made), but I’m not the only one who finds Disney’s lack of faith in its signature IP disturbing, and I struggle to imagine that it will work out well for them. Levy’s hiring only seems to deepen the s

Which is to say: Films that connected with audiences because they dared to emphasize an idiosyncratic creative vision over the safety of selling people on something they’d already seen before.

"DOGE is not a serious exercise," said Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank that supports streamlining government. She estimates DOGE has only saved $5 billion to date, and believes it will end up costing more than it saves. The examples - previously unreported - span 14 government agencies and were described in Reuters interviews with three dozen federal workers, union representatives and governance experts.

At the Social Security Administration, in a four-day period in the first week of March, computer systems crashed 10 times. Because a quarter of the agency's IT staff have quit or been fired, it's taking longer to get the systems online again, disrupting the processing of claims, one IT worker told Reuters. Few dispute the SSA's computer systems are old, often crash and need updating. Musk told Baier the agency's computer systems are "failing", and "we're fixing it."

Since its founding on Trump's first day in the White House, DOGE has largely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world's needy, canceling more than 80 percent of its humanitarian programs. Almost all of the agency's employees will be fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, with some functions absorbed into the State Department. At home, the government overhaul has resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally. Over 20,000 probationary workers - recently hired or recently reassigned employees - were fired in February. After court rulings they were reinstated but most were sent home on full pay. Most are now being fired again after further court decisions.

Trump and Musk have said the U.S. government is beset by fraud and waste. Few civil servants and governance experts dispute efficiencies can be made, but say there are already people inside the federal bureaucracy trying to save taxpayer dollars. Yet some of these offices have been targeted for cuts by DOGE.

As a grieving mother, I was glad that the men who so wantonly inflicted such violence had been held accountable and taken off the streets. But that doesn’t mean that I support any act of retribution our government might want to take in my son’s name.

Despite my personal tragedy — in fact, because of it — I do not believe the U.S. should wage war on immigrants, or deport people to prison in El Salvador without due process

as sensational stories about gang violence dominate headlines, the most impactful perspective I can offer is my experience as a bereaved mother who lost her son to MS-13 and witnessed the justice system at work. I hope my story brings nuance and can represent not just my experience but also the values that I tried to instill in my son.  Trump says he’s pursuing these deportations on behalf of MS-13 victims like Oscar, but I don’t think his policy is making our communities safer — ultimately, I think he’s serving his political agenda. Below, I share a few points to support this belief. Some of these points may not apply to other gangs, but the principles of justice, accountability, and human rights remain the same.

A lot of the people Trump is sending away may not be affiliated with gangs, and some may be, but they still are not the “worst of the worst” Trump often talks about on the campaign trail

it is not illegal to be a gang member. And it makes sense: We don’t imprison people for crimes their families or friends commit. Our justice system is based on the assumption of “innocent until proven guilty,” and we cannot be criminally guilty by association. Oscar was going through a rough adolescent phase, and his charges were minor: stealing liquor from a grocery store, stealing a 99-cent iced tea, testing positive for marijuana. The rush to deport people labeled as “gang affiliated” — without charges, without trials — ignores this legal distinction, and would have endangered Oscar himself were he still alive.

“Can machines be therapists?” is a question receiving increased attention given the relative ease of working with generative artificial intelligence. Although recent (and decades-old) research has found that humans struggle to tell the difference between responses from machines and humans, recent findings suggest that artificial intelligence can write empathically and the generated content is rated highly by therapists and outperforms professionals. It is uncertain whether, in a preregistered competition where therapists and ChatGPT respond to therapeutic vignettes about couple therapy, a) a panel of participants can tell which responses are ChatGPT-generated and which are written by therapists (N = 13), b) the generated responses or the therapist-written responses fall more in line with key therapy principles, and c) linguistic differences between conditions are present. In a large sample (N = 830), we showed that a) participants could rarely tell the difference between responses written by ChatGPT and responses written by a therapist, b) the responses written by ChatGPT were generally rated higher in key psychotherapy principles, and c) the language patterns between ChatGPT and therapists were different. Using different measures, we then confirmed that responses written by ChatGPT were rated higher than the therapist’s responses suggesting these differences may be explained by part-of-speech and response sentiment. This may be an early indication that ChatGPT has the potential to improve psychotherapeutic processes. We anticipate that this work may lead to the development of different methods of testing and creating psychotherapeutic interventions. Further, we discuss limitations (including the lack of the therapeutic context), and how continued research in this area may lead to improved efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions allowing such interventions to be placed in the hands of individuals who need them the most.

Americans have long accepted that universities shouldn’t operate with total autonomy while accepting federal dollars. If the administration were pressuring Harvard to adopt more progressive policies, I’m sure the university would acquiesce without controversy. Furthermore, the federal government is typically understood to have wide latitude in revoking funding. After all, money from the government doesn’t come without strings, and public schools deal with that fact all the time. With that in mind, the Trump administration making Harvard’s funding contingent upon a set of requirements is generally reasonable. However, some of the administration’s specific requests are totally unreasonable. Asking for audits into the entire Medical School and Divinity School as well as individual departments, or proposing ultraspecific reforms to discipline standards that include the amorphous “discipline” of all students involved in pro-Palestine campus organizations, are incredible examples of federal overreach.

Skeptics argue that many of the classic symptoms of the disorder — fidgeting, losing things, not following instructions — are simply typical, if annoying, behaviors of childhood. In response, others point to the serious consequences that can result when those symptoms grow more intense, including school failure, social rejection and serious emotional distress.

There are two main kinds of A.D.H.D., inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive, and children in one category often seem to have little in common with children in the other. There are people with A.D.H.D. whom you can’t get to stop talking and others whom you can’t get to start. Some are excessively eager and enthusiastic; others are irritable and moody.

Although the D.S.M. specifies that clinicians shouldn’t diagnose children with A.D.H.D. if their symptoms are better explained by another mental disorder, more than three quarters of children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. do have another mental-health condition as well, according to the C.D.C. More than a third have a diagnosis of anxiety, and a similar fraction have a diagnosed learning disorder. Forty-four percent have been diagnosed with a behavioral disorder like oppositional defiant disorder.

This all complicates the effort to portray A.D.H.D. as a distinct, unique biological disorder. Is a patient with six symptoms really that different from one with five? If a child who experienced early trauma now can’t sit still or stay organized, should she be treated for A.D.H.D.? What about a child with an anxiety disorder who is constantly distracted by her worries? Does she have A.D.H.D., or just A.D.H.D.-like symptoms caused by her anxiety?

The subjects who were given stimulants worked more quickly and intensely than the ones who took the placebo. They dutifully packed and repacked their virtual backpacks, pulling items in and out, trying various combinations. In the end, though, their scores on the knapsack test were no better than the placebo group. The reason? Their strategies for choosing items became significantly worse under the medication. Their choices didn’t make much sense — they just kept pulling random items in and out of the backpack. To an observer, they appeared to be focused, well behaved, on task. But in fact, they weren’t accomplishing anything of much value.

Farah directed me to the work of Scott Vrecko, a sociologist who conducted a series of interviews with students at an American university who used stimulant medication without a prescription. He wrote that the students he interviewed would often “frame the functional benefits of stimulants in cognitive-sounding terms.” But when he dug a little deeper, he found that the students tended to talk about their attention struggles, and the benefits they experienced with medication, in emotional terms rather than intellectual ones. Without the pills, they said, they just didn’t feel interested in the assignments they were supposed to be doing. They didn’t feel motivated. It all seemed pointless.

On stimulant medication, those emotions flipped. “You start to feel such a connection to what you’re working on,” one undergraduate told Vrecko. “It’s almost like you fall in love with it.” As another student put it: On Adderall, “you’re interested in what you’re doing, even if it’s boring.”

Socially, though, there was a price. “Around my friends, I’m usually the most social, but when I’m on it, it feels like my spark is kind of gone,” John said. “I laugh a lot less. I can’t think of anything to say. Life is just less fun. It’s not like I’m sad; I’m just not as happy. It flattens things out.”

John also generally doesn’t take his Adderall during the summer. When he’s not in school, he told me, he doesn’t have any A.D.H.D. symptoms at all. “If I don’t have to do any work, then I’m just a completely regular person,” he said. “But once I have to focus on things, then I have to take it, or else I just won’t get any of my stuff done.”

John’s sense that his A.D.H.D. is situational — that he has it in some circumstances but not in others — is a challenge to some of psychiatry’s longstanding assumptions about the condition. After all, diabetes doesn’t go away over summer vacation. But John’s intuition is supported by scientific evidence. Increasingly, research suggests that for many people A.D.H.D. might be thought of as a condition they experience, sometimes temporarily, rather than a disorder that they have in some unchanging way.

For most of his career, he embraced what he now calls the “medical model” of A.D.H.D — the belief that the brains of people with A.D.H.D. are biologically deficient, categorically different from those of typical, healthy individuals. Now, however, Sonuga-Barke is proposing an alternative model, one that largely sidesteps questions of biology. What matters instead, he says, is the distress children feel as they try to make their way in the world.

Sonuga-Barke’s proposed model locates A.D.H.D. symptoms on a continuum, rather than presenting the condition as a distinct, natural category. And it departs from the medical model in another crucial way: It considers those symptoms not as indications of neurological deficits but as signals of a misalignment between a child’s biological makeup and the environment in which they are trying to function. “I’m not saying it’s not biological,” he says. “I’m just saying I don’t think that’s the right target. Rather than trying to treat and resolve the biology, we should be focusing on building environments that improve outcomes and mental health.”

What the researchers noticed was that their subjects weren’t particularly interested in talking about the specifics of their disorder. Instead, they wanted to talk about the context in which they were now living and how that context had affected their symptoms. Subject after subject spontaneously brought up the importance of finding their “niche,” or the right “fit,” in school or in the workplace. As adults, they had more freedom than they did as children to control the parameters of their lives — whether to go to college, what to study, what kind of career to pursue. Many of them had sensibly chosen contexts that were a better match for their personalities than what they experienced in school, and as a result, they reported that their A.D.H.D. symptoms had essentially disappeared. In fact, some of them were questioning whether they had ever had a disorder at all — or if they had just been in the wrong environment as children.

The work environments where the subjects were thriving varied. For some, the appeal of their new jobs was that they were busy and cognitively demanding, requiring constant multitasking. For others, the right context was physical, hands-on labor. For all of them, what made a difference was having work that to them felt “intrinsically interesting.”

“Rather than a static ‘attention deficit’ that appeared under all circumstances,” the M.T.A. researchers wrote, “our subjects described their propensity toward distraction as contextual. … Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”

For the young adults in the “niche” study who were interviewed about their work lives, the transition that helped them overcome their A.D.H.D. symptoms often was leaving academic work for something more kinetic. For Sonuga-Barke, it was the opposite. At university, he would show up at the library at 9 every morning and sit in his carrel working until 5. The next day, he would do it again. Growing up, he says, he had a natural tendency to “hyperfocus,” and back at school in Derby, that tendency looked to his teachers like daydreaming. At university, it became his secret weapon

I asked Sonuga-Barke what he might have gained if he grew up in a different time and place — if he was prescribed Ritalin or Adderall at age 8 instead of just being packed off to the remedial class. “I don’t think I would have gained anything,” he said. “I think without medication, you learn alternative ways of dealing with stuff. In my particular case, there are a lot of characteristics that have helped me. My mind is constantly churning away, thinking of things. I never relax. The way I motivate myself is to turn everything into a problem and to try and solve the problem.”

“The simple model has always been, basically, ‘A.D.H.D. plus medication equals no A.D.H.D.,’” he says. “But that’s not true. Medication is not a silver bullet. It never will be.” What medication can sometimes do, he believes, is allow families more room to communicate. “At its best,” he says, “medication can provide a window for parents to engage with their kids,” by moderating children’s behavior, at least temporarily, so that family life can become more than just endless fights about overdue homework and lost lunchboxes. “If you have a more positive relationship with your child, they’re going to have a better outcome. Not for their A.D.H.D. — it’s probably going to be just the same. But in terms of dealing with the self-hatred and low self-esteem that often goes along with A.D.H.D.

The alternative model, by contrast, tells a child a very different story: that his A.D.H.D. symptoms exist on a continuum, one on which we all find ourselves; that he may be experiencing those symptoms as much because of where he is as because of who he is; and that next year, if things change in his surroundings, those symptoms might change as well. Armed with that understanding, he and his family can decide whether medication makes sense — whether for him, the benefits are likely to outweigh the drawbacks. At the same time, they can consider whether there are changes in his situation, at school or at home, that might help alleviate his symptoms.

Admittedly, that version of A.D.H.D. has certain drawbacks. It denies parents the clear, definitive explanation for their children’s problems that can come as such a relief, especially after months or years of frustration and uncertainty. It often requires a lot of flexibility and experimentation on the part of patients, families and doctors. But it has two important advantages as well: First, the new model more accurately reflects the latest scientific understanding of A.D.H.D. And second, it gives children a vision of their future in which things might actually improve — not because their brains are chemically refashioned in a way that makes them better able to fit into the world, but because they find a way to make the world fit better around their complicated and distinctive brains.

manufacturing in Asia is fundamentally different than the manufacturing we remember in the United States decades ago: instead of firms with product-specific factories, China has flexible factories that accommodate all kinds of orders, delivering on that vector of speed, convenience, and customization that Christensen talked about.

Every decrease in node size comes at increasingly astronomical costs; the best way to afford those costs is to have one entity making chips for everyone, and that has turned out to be TSMC. Indeed, one way to understand Intel’s struggles is that it was actually one of the last massive integrated manufacturers: Intel made chips almost entirely for itself. However, once the company missed mobile, it had no choice but to switch to a foundry model; the company is trying now, but really should have started fifteen years ago. Now the company is stuck, and I think they will need government help.

companies that go up-market find it impossible to go back down, and I think this too applies to countries. Start with the theory: Christensen had a chapter in The Innovator’s Dilemma entitled “What Goes Up, Can’t Go Down”: Three factors — the promise of upmarket margins, the simultaneous upmarket movement of many of a company’s customers, and the difficulty of cutting costs to move downmarket profitably — together create powerful barriers to downward mobility. In the internal debates about resource allocation for new product development, therefore, proposals to pursue disruptive technologies generally lose out to proposals to move upmarket. In fact, cultivating a systematic approach to weeding out new product development initiatives that would likely lower profits is one of the most important achievements of any well-managed company.

So could Apple pay more to get U.S. workers? I suppose — leaving aside the questions of skills and whatnot — but there is also the question of desirability; the iPhone assembly work that is not automated is highly drudgerous, sitting in a factory for hours a day delicately assembling the same components over and over again. It’s a good job if the alternative is working in the fields or in a much more dangerous and uncomfortable factory, but it’s much worse than basically any sort of job that is available in the U.S. market.

First, blanket tariffs are a mistake. I understand the motivation: a big reason why Chinese imports to the U.S. have actually shrunk over the last few years is because a lot of final assembly moved to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, etc. Blanket tariffs stop this from happening, at least in theory. The problem, however, is that those final assembly jobs are the least desirable jobs in the value chain, at least for the American worker; assuming the Trump administration doesn’t want to import millions of workers — that seems rather counter to the foundation of his candidacy! — the United States needs to find alternative trustworthy countries for final assembly. This can be accomplished through selective tariffs (which is exactly what happened in the first Trump administration).

Secondly, using trade flows to measure the health of the economic relationship with these countries — any country, really, but particularly final assembly countries — is legitimately stupid. Go back to the iPhone: the value-add of final assembly is in the single digit dollar range; the value-add of Apple’s software, marketing, distribution, etc. is in the hundreds of dollars. Simply looking at trade flows — where an imported iPhone is calculated as a trade deficit of several hundred dollars — completely obscures this reality. Moreover, the criteria for a final assembly country is that they have low wages, which by definition can’t pay for an equivalent amount of U.S. goods to said iPhone.

At the same time, the overall value of final assembly does exceed its economic value, for the reasons noted above: final assembly is gravity for higher value components, and it’s those components that are the biggest national security problem. This is where component tariffs might be a useful tool: the U.S. could use a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer to incentivize buying components from trusted allies, or from the U.S. itself, or to build new capacity in trusted locations. This does, admittedly, start to sound a lot like central planning, but that is why the gravity argument is an important one: simply moving final assembly somewhere other than China is a win — but not if there are blanket tariffs, at which point you might as well leave the supply chain where it is.

You can certainly make the case that things like castings and other machine components are of sufficient importance to the U.S. that they ought to be manufactured here, but you have to ramp up to that. What is much more problematic is that raw materials and components are now much cheaper for Haas’ foreign competitors; even if those competitors face tariffs in the United States, their cost of goods sold will be meaningfully lower than Haas, completely defeating the goal of encouraging the purchase of U.S. machine tools.

Fourth, there remains the problem of chips. Trump just declared economic war on China, which definitionally increases the possibility of kinetic war. A kinetic war, however, will mean the destruction of TSMC, leaving the U.S. bereft of chips at the very moment that A.I. is poised to create tremendous opportunities for growth and automation. And, even if A.I. didn’t exist, it’s enough to note that modern life would grind to a halt without chips. That’s why this is the area that most needs direct intervention from the federal government, particularly in terms of incentivizing demand for both leading and trailing edge U.S. chips.

my prevailing emotion over the past week — one I didn’t fully come to grips with until interrogating why Monday’s Article failed to live up to my standards — is sadness over the end of an era in technology, and frustration-bordering-on-disillusionment over the demise of what I thought was a uniquely American spirit.

Internet 1.0 was about technology. This was the early web, when technology was made for technology’s sake. This was when we got standards like TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, etc. This was obviously the best era, but one that was impossible to maintain once there was big money to be made on the Internet. Internet 2.0 was about economics. This was the era of Aggregators — the era of Stratechery, in other words — when the Internet developed, for better or worse, in ways that made maximum economic sense. This was a massive boon for the U.S., which sits astride the world of technology; unfortunately none of the value that comes from that position is counted in the trade statistics, so the administration doesn’t seem to care. Internet 3.0 is about politics. This is the era when countries make economically sub-optimal choices for reasons that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. In that Article I thought that Big Tech exercising its power against the President might be a spur for other countries to seek to wean themselves away from American companies; instead it is the U.S. that may be leaving other countries little choice but to retaliate against U.S. tech.

There is, admittedly, a hint of that old school American can-do attitude embedded in these tariffs: the Trump administration seems to believe the U.S. can overcome all of the naysayers and skeptics through sheer force of will. That force of will, however, would be much better spent pursuing a vision of a new world order in 2050, not trying to return to 1950. That is possible to do, by the way, but only if you accept 1950’s living standards, which weren’t nearly as attractive as nostalgia-colored glasses paint them, and if we’re not careful, 1950’s technology as well. I think we can do better that that; I know we can do better than this.

It’s not optimism or pessimism either. Optimism states the glass is half full. Pessimism states the glass is half empty. High agency states you’re a tap.

The ruminating perfectionist keeps kicking cans down the road because they can’t find a perfect option with zero perceived risk — only to end up with lots of cans and no more road to kick them down.

"I’ve spent the last 5 years thinking about leaving my hometown of Doncaster and going to New York — but there’s no perfect option. When my mind thinks of going to New York, it plays a horror film of the expensive rent draining my bank account and me losing contact with my home friends. When my mind thinks of staying in Doncaster, it plays a horror film of me as an old man wondering what could’ve been if I moved to New York.” — When faced with those horror films, they opt for more ruminating time.

One tool to make this easier is to reframe decisions as experiments. You’re no longer a perfectionist frozen on stage with everyone watching your every move, you’re a curious scientist in a lab trying to test a hypothesis. E.g. “I’m 60% certain that moving to New York is better than 40% of staying in Doncaster…Ok. It’s time to Blitzkrieg.” Book the tickets to New York and run the experiment. Success isn’t whether your forecast is correct and New York is perfect, it’s that you tested the hypothesis.

Video games break us out of the overwhelm trap by chunking everything down into small enough chunks to create momentum — Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 etc. Each level is small enough to not be overwhelming, but big enough to be addicted to the progress.

The person in the vague trap often spends countless hours thinking — without once thinking clearly. The average person has 10-60,000 thoughts per day. Can you remember any specific thoughts from yesterday? Thoughts feel so real in the moment and then disappear into the memory abyss. Most thoughts aren’t even clear sentences. It’s a series of emotional GIFs, JPEGs and prompts bouncing around consciousness like a random Tumblr page.

Each time you transform your thoughts out of your head, keep trying to refine problems and solutions in the simplest, clearest, most specific language possible. As you transform out of your head, remember: The vague trap is often downstream from vague questions. Vague question: What career should I choose? ‍Specific question: What does my dream week look like hour by hour? What does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? What’s the gap between my current week and the dream/nightmare week?

when one of us gives something away, be it an actual design or even just telling someone their choice of typefaces suck and maybe even why, you have devalued your own work in addition to everyone else's.

Get something for you work. Always, always, always get something of actual value for your work. Money is ideal, but barter is certainly an option. In my twenties I went for a span of about five years without paying for a drink anywhere I went out because I made everyone's fliers, and I went out a lot.

What you do is valuable. I don't mean that it enriches society or gives us a more robust culture or any touchy-feely bullshit like that, I mean it's worth money. It is a skill that other people should be paying you to use.

“I honestly don’t know what happened, except now I’m reading his interviews because he decides to do some PR campaign about him leaving the show,” White said. “I don’t think he respected me. He wants people to know that he’s edgy and dark and I’m, I don’t know, like I watch reality TV. We never really even fought. He says we feuded. I don’t think I ever had a fight with him — except for maybe some emails. It was basically me giving him notes. I don’t think he liked to go through the process of getting notes from me, or wanting revisions, because he didn’t respect me. I knew he wasn’t a team player and that he wanted to do it his way. I was thrown that he would go to The New York Times to shit on me and the show three days before the finale. It was kind of a bitch move.”

“By the time the third season came around, he’d won Emmys and he had his song go viral, he didn’t want to go through the process with me, he didn’t want to go to sessions. He would always look at me with this contemptuous smirk on his face like he thought I was a chimp or something … he’s definitely making a big deal out of a creative difference.”

“They’re criticizing the show in certain ways and they’re meaner in certain ways [now that the show is popular],” White said. “I’m used to being this underdog indie writer that people are championing. Certain things will hurt my feelings or I’ll feel misunderstood. The mean ones have gotten meaner. It’s like they don’t like me. I guess I need to either avoid that stuff or get tougher, because it does bum me out.”

Some of the finale gripes that bothered White the most were — for instance — complaints that the surviving characters should be getting interviewed by Thai police after the tragic resort murders in the last episode. “Little logic police — really, you can’t enjoy the vibe and the emotional arcs because you’re so caught up in the — this isn’t a police procedural, this is a rumination-type show,” he said. “It makes me want to pull my hair out. Is this how you watch movies and TV shows? Constant literal police?”

In fact, White says he’s about to hit the road again to get out of Los Angeles and clear his head. “I’m going to Colombia today just to get the hell out of here,” he said. “I’ve never been there. I don’t think [season four is] going to South America, but I’ve never been there. Maybe one day. I just got to get out of L.A. I’m scrolling on my phone and reading shit about the show and this is not the finish line that I want.”

Trump was interviewed, and he explained a very simple and also absurd view: He believes “a deficit is a loss” and therefore wants to be “even” or have trade surpluses with every country.  It’s worth pausing here to explain how nonsensical Trump’s actual position is. The United States is the richest nation on earth with the most prolific consumers in the world. In most cases, that makes us net buyers of other countries’ products, but in some cases countries want more of our own exports. For instance, we lump our trade policies towards Germany and the Netherlands into one broad policy on the European Union, but we have a trade deficit with Germany and a trade surplus with the Netherlands. Why? As a Council on Foreign Relations primer explains, we love German cars and machinery, and the Netherlands loves American medical equipment and pharmaceuticals. Dynamiting this free, beneficial exchange with Germany to make it look like the relationship we have with a different country — as Trump apparently wants to do — doesn't make any sense.

A cohesive industrial policy would be good for American workers, but a major stock market crash and recession would not. Obviously. Tens of millions of American workers are in the services industry that could be crushed by these tariffs. If you manage a business that involves importing parts for construction, you are also headed for very big trouble. There has to be an off-ramp or a fleshed-out plan for success — and there has to be a way to navigate the storm that’s coming. But I don’t get the sense we have that right now.

If you really want to be intellectually honest, you have to acknowledge the possibility (however slim) that Trump’s tariff gambit induces better trade deals, raises billions or trillions in tariff revenue, refinances our debt, and helps us confront China on trade. Still, to help manage the immediate pain and uncertainty, the administration ought to set some parameters: What do success and failure look like? What deals are we hunting with adversaries in global trade? How much manufacturing investment do we want to bring home? How much tariff revenue do we want to raise? Despite the lack of answers to these questions, I hope this is all part of some larger plan to refinance the debt and invite better trade deals — but I also know that is me projecting my wants onto this administration again. Contrary to my hope, a good deal of reporting indicates that Trump’s economic team spent months working on individualized tariff plans for different countries before he instead opted for a simple, broad formula to apply to all of them.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said over 50 countries have already approached him to make tariff deals. If true, this is good news, as successful negotiations could help us avoid a worst-case economic downturn. But simultaneously, the administration has insisted they aren’t going to negotiate, and Axios reported on internal frustration within the administration over the lack of structure to even conduct such negotiations. This constitutes a pattern: We’ve seen it with the Department of Government Efficiency, with deportations, and now with tariffs. Trump could be approaching popular ideas like efficiency reforms or reworking trade policies with fleshed-out plans, but instead all the signals out of the White House show them shooting from the hip and trying to figure the mess out as it happens.

The annoying truth, though, is that the consensus is usually the consensus because it’s accurate. If The Experts are right here — which I have an increasingly hard time doubting — we are headed for an economic storm I’m not sure people have totally prepared for.

The “sales, then logistics” framework: Always sell people on why something matters before diving into how to do it. Even executives who seem rushed need 30 to 60 seconds of context for why this matters now.

Being concise is about density of insight, not brevity: “Being concise is not about absolute word count. It’s about economy of words and density of the insight.” The bottleneck to being concise is often unclear thinking.

Use “signposting” to guide your audience: Words like “for example,” “because,” “as a next step,” and “first, second, third”

Before sharing an idea, spend just a few seconds anticipating the most obvious objections.

Don’t overstate hypotheses as facts or understate strong recommendations. Match your conviction level to the evidence available.

Focus on motivating behavior change rather than venting your frustrations. “Trim 90% of what you initially want to say and keep only the 10% that will make the person want to change.”

he CEDAF delegation framework: Comprehension: Ensure they understand what needs to be done Excitement: Make the task meaningful and motivating De-risk: Anticipate and address potential issues Align: Confirm mutual understanding Feedback: Create the shortest possible feedback loop

Whatever tools may be at the disposal of the Federal Reserve and the US federal government will not be able to undo the damage to reputation and relationships upon which so much commerce bases its functions on day-to-day. As much as humans fancy themselves civilized and sophisticated, as a whole, societies still have serious trust issues internally and therefore externally. That’s why the concept of “credit” exists worldwide for the most part and is a component of trade, of alliances, and of good will.

By first taking a chainsaw to the global relationships of a worldview nature — most easily seen in the conflict of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rightful concern expressed by Western interests…credit has been damaged. By next taking a chainsaw to the global trade relationships which have functioned for decades and, while problematic, have enabled commerce to proceed at a reasonable level…credit has been damaged. By exploiting internal divisiveness of the political spectrum and the wealth inequality where the investor class seemingly has unchecked rule over hundreds of millions of disenfranchised people in the United States…the nation can no longer trust itself.

The proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.” By this logic, anything that slows the flow of imports, or raises their cost, would indeed be a self-inflicted wound. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to block the sale of U.S. electric vehicles in China, let it. We should still want as many cheap Chinese EVs as possible flooding into our market.

Even Friedman’s claim that “the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible,” runs directly counter to what Smith actually wrote, which was: “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry.”

With some part of the produce of our own country. A vital assumption of the classical model was that trade would be balanced—something made here for something made there