. Perhaps you see the liberal-arts idyll, removed from the pressures of the broader world and filled with tweedy creatures reading on quadrangle lawns. This is the redoubt of the idealized figure of the English major, sensitive and sweatered, moving from “Pale Fire” to “The Fire Next Time” and scaling the heights of “Ulysses” for the view. The goal of such an education isn’t direct career training but cultivation of the min

Or perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It’s the small-bore university of campus comedy—of “Lucky Jim” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—but also the quarry of deconstruction, quantum electrodynamics, and value theory. It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn’t have an opportunity to emerge anywhere else.

English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.

“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall.

In a quantitative society for which optimization—getting the most output from your input—has become a self-evident good, universities prize actions that shift numbers, and pre-professionalism lends itself to traceable change

One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them

I'm sure this has been said time and time again, but I'll repeat it just in case: be yourself and don't think too hard about it. In the design community, share what you're working on, genuinely participate in discussions about it or about others' work, and focus on making connections by doing and posting what you like to do. This essentially eliminates the "work" from building an audience — it's probably not going to feel great if you build up a presence by putting on a facade or doing growth hack-y things.

DAOs are effectively owned and governed by people who hold a sufficient number of a DAO’s native token, which functions like a type of cryptocurrency. For example, $FWB is the native token of popular social DAO called Friends With Benefits, and people can buy, earn, or trade it.

Contributors will be able to use their DAO’s native tokens to vote on key decisions. You can get a glimpse into the kinds of decisions DAO members are already voting on at Snapshot, which is essentially a decentralized voting system. Having said this, existing voting mechanisms have been criticized by the likes of Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, the open-source blockchain that acts as a foundational layer for the majority of Web3 applications. So, this type of voting is likely to evolve over time.

Lots of Marvel fans were very angry with me because I’m an older millennial that engages in fandom as a way to critique and discuss topics that interest me, instead of how Gen Z engages with fandom, which is more of a mildly-fascist personality cult you pledge hysterical allegiance to as a way to push it further up a digital leaderboard within the greater online attention economy

Master morality is appealing to leaders — that’s why powerful people tend to be more right wing or Master Morality oriented — because of course people at the top of the hierarchy are going to believe in hierarchy.

Women and marginalized people who change jobs: Flakey and incapable. Unable to handle a job. Something must be wrong. Clearly a sign of caution to be taken as a reason not to work with them.Men who change jobs: literally articles inventing new vernacular stemming from the mental gymnastics required to justify the hypocrisy — men aren’t incapable because they change jobs — they are prodigy — men aren’t untrustworthy for changing jobs — they are taking nonlinear career paths because of the uncertainty in the market

valuesHonestyAuthenticityCuriosityAccessibility

A couple themes emerged: Thing 1: Professional GROWTH has become a source of stress. I used to love reading work related books and listening to work related podcasts, and now those things stress me out. I used to feel like “these are great ideas and I’m excited to try them and talk about them at work.” And now it feels more like “these are great ideas that I should have been doing already and therefore I’m failing.” So I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve read mostly fiction and listened to mostly non-work podcasts for a long time now.

Thing 2: Professional JOY has become based on how others view me. I find joy in significance. I like knowing that I’m making an impact. And in the absence of any clear metric of my performance, I’ve started using “does everyone think I’m awesome?” as a basic proxy for “am I doing a good job?” And the problem is that it’s unknowable. My brain is always able to list people who may not think I’m awesome, or reasons why I may not be seen as awesome, or things other people who are more awesome would be doing better than me in my position.

Is there anything that I value for its own sake, rather than for the social capital it gets me?

The focus of this role will be on brand, brand strategy, storytelling, video storytelling, and art direction of content. The type of work we expect to engage this Creative Director in is less about physical (hardware) and digital (software) product design and more on helping clients and teams with the ambiguity of understanding their brand, using that perspective to inform their product strategy or messaging, and delivering that message through compelling content and assets. Personality-wise, you’re a dynamic presenter with engaging charisma and you’re endowed with the diplomatic and interpersonal skills of a head of state, adept at working effectively with a diverse range of co-workers and clients to produce superlative results; and possess a nimble, solution-oriented mindset. You are a gifted storyteller with strong writing and communication skills. You understand how to clarify and amplify a client’s brand through clear messaging, a compelling user experience or journey, and how to tell that story through copy, messaging, renderings, animation, and video mediums. You have exceptional presentation skills and treat presentations as a performance.

In some ways this aesthetic is the 'kids version' of Frasurbane, with an emphasis on scholastic endeavors, 'edutainment', and an 'end-of-history' approach to learning. It uses the same classical and 'timeless' typography and imagery with Frasurbane, adding in the aesthetic of 'stock photography collage' depicting the most basic and identifiable depictions of forms and concepts for quick comprehension. This reliance on this style of collage is predicated on two factors in the era; the proliferation of stock photography collections, and the development of desktop publishing & graphics-editing software in the 1980s.

I think when you're starting a company, it's really useful to ask the question, why now? And this is like, pretty cliche for startup stuff, so if you've heard of it already, apologies, but I do think it's a really useful framework. And that question of why now? Can be societal. Maybe there's some new cultural trend, perhaps it's regulatory. Some law has been passed or appealed. I like the technological version. And for us we saw drones in 2012 and WebGL as few technologies that were happening where because these technologies were happening, new possibilities were suddenly there.

But we're like, why would you do anything in photo editing if you're not on the phone? And so we felt like we were kind of building the wrong place and then eventually sort of shifted our attention to design, which I had been a design internet flipboard and that helped kind of help me realize what would be possible there.

And I would just say don't just go for an idea because it's kind of working. Go for an idea that you really care about because even if it doesn't work, you'll still learn from it and you'll still have one.

those most likely to become entrepreneurs are well-rounded. A 2005 study from Edward Lazear suggests that the self-employed tend to be generalists, not specialists.

To Ryan, staying committed to decrepit structures, and insisting to others that they are fundamentally safe when they’re clearly not, is what feels reckless.

The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.

These articles are often marked by a desire to challenge, sometimes aggressively, what was previously considered settled wisdom, and even more so by a deep skepticism about the actions and motives of established institutions and public figures—the federal government, blue chip corporations, the admissions office at Harvard, and so on. The other half of our readership finds these stories crackpot or paranoid, or worse.

Over the past few years, even as Tablet’s audience has grown, some readers have questioned why a Jewish magazine has taken so much interest in topics that, at first glance, appear to have no Jewish connection at all: Russiagate, school closures, content moderation by tech companies, government surveillance, masks, U.S. investment in China, and more. Part of the explanation is that Tablet’s mission was never just to make the world smarter about Jews; it was also to make Jews smarter about the world.

Unlike the “trauma plot,” Parul Sehgal’s coinage for the use of trauma as narrative payoff, the therapeutic plot doesn’t wallow in trauma itself. Instead, it offers formulaic accounts of diagnosis and healing—what Janet Malcolm has called “the streamlined truisms of the age of mental health.”

Book blogs sort recommendations by pathology (severe social anxiety, schizophrenia, body dysmorphia), symptom (anxiety, panic attacks), and trauma (parental suicide, psychiatric stay). Fans diagnose characters with mental disorders (a fan theory diagnoses the character Bruno from another recent Pixar offering, Encanto, with obsessive compulsive disorder). Self-diagnosis even informed the development of Everything Everywhere. In early drafts of the script, Evelyn suffered from undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Writing and researching her character inspired Kwan to identify and seek treatment for his own heretofore undiagnosed ADHD.

No doubt, such a medical diagnosis can provide relief and resolution. But is such a diagnosis the job of art? What is lost when audiences and creators eschew other ways of discussing fiction (for example, E.M. Forster’s distinction between round and flat characters) and instead reduce characters to clinical profiles?

In ancient Athenian tragedy, catharsis was defined by Aristotle’s Poetics as the ritual purification and purgation of emotions, particularly pity and fear. Pity arises from identification with the tragic hero, whose nobility is compromised by a fatal flaw, and fear is elicited by his excessive punishment. The therapeutic significance of catharsis originated much later in the theories of Sigmund Freud. By applying Joseph Breuer’s “cathartic method,” Freud theorized that hypnosis allowed patients to recall the traumatic experience at the root of their condition. Catharsis was Freud’s first major breakthrough, and his first brush with the powers of the unconscious that would form the underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory.For Aristotle, catharsis was the result of anagnorisis—the humility produced by the tragic hero’s recognition not only of the calamity that had befallen him, but also of his own role in bringing it about. Freud, meanwhile, described an inherent tragedy in the “impossible profession” of psychoanalysis, “in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results.” It wasn’t that Freud had no faith in his own methods; he simply perceived the enormity of the human condition, and understood that the odds of success were not stacked in the psychoanalyst’s favor.Humility is absent from today’s therapeutic catharsis, which assumes with algorithmic certainty that sharing will lead to understanding, and that understanding will lead to healing. Art’s role, according to Everything Everywhere actress Stephanie Hsu, is “to hold space for trauma and offer catharsis,” and to recognize that “empathy and radical empathy and radical kindness are also a tool.” Buried beneath this gauzy language is the fact that the “empathy” of Turning Red and Everything Everywhere rely on the transformation of the mothers, not their children. The adults must learn that children are individuals rather than extensions of parental will, and when empathy is granted to mothers, it is only through their shared status as victims.

Pity the immigrant women who fled war-torn nations and corrupt regimes only to be subjected to psychoanalysis from hipster filmmakers and their own children

All this is not to say that storytelling holds no empathic power, nor an ability to transcend individual perspectives. But this power lies in art’s ability to overthrow, not reify, easy solutions—to challenge rather than “validate.” The transmission of suffering from one generation to the next is a worthy subject for art, but not because its effect on any particular demographic has been under-represented.

Our approach to culture should account for rigor and complexity, not defer to trite solutionism.

Duolingo had already implemented several gamification mechanics successfully, such as the progression system on the home screen, streaks, and an achievements system. And second, top digital games at the time had much higher retention rates than our product, which I took as evidence that we hadn’t yet reached the ceiling for gamification’s impact.

The moves counter allowed users only a finite number of moves to complete a level, which added a sense of scarcity and urgency to the gameplay. We decided to incorporate the counter mechanic into our product. We gave our users a finite number of chances to answer questions correctly before they had to start the lesson over.

Depressingly, the result of all that effort was completely neutral. No change to our retention. No increase in DAU. We hardly got any user feedback at all.

When you are playing Gardenscapes, each move feels like a strategic decision, because you have to outmaneuver dynamic obstacles to find a path to victory. But strategic decision-making isn’t required to complete a Duolingo lesson—you mostly either know the answer to a question or you don’t. Because there wasn’t any strategy to it, the Duolingo moves counter was simply a boring, tacked-on nuisance. It was the wrong gamification mechanic to adopt into Duolingo. I realized that I had been so focused on the similarities between Gardenscapes and Duolingo that I had failed to account for the importance of the underlying differences.

Referrals work for Uber because riders are paying for rides on a never-ending pay-as-you-go system. A free ride is a constant incentive. For Duolingo, we were trying to incentivize users by offering a free month of Super Duolingo. However, our best and most active users already had Super Duolingo, and we couldn’t give them a free month when they were already in a plan. This meant that our strategy, which needed to rely on our best users, actually excluded them.

Now when looking to adopt a feature, I ask myself:Why is this feature working in that product?Why might this feature succeed or fail in our context, i.e. will it translate well?What adaptations are necessary to make this feature succeed in our context?

Our failure with the Gardenscapes-style moves counter hadn’t actually disproved any of the original reasons why we believed gamification still had upside for Duolingo—we had only learned that the moves counter was a clumsy attempt at it. This time, we would be more methodical and intelligent about features we added or borrowed.

We deliberately made our leaderboard as casual and frictionless as possible; users were automatically opted in and could progress to the top of the first league by merely engaging consistently in their regular language study. By keeping the game mechanic exciting, but making it simpler than in FarmVille 2, we felt like we had struck the right balance of adopting and adapting.

If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year.

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing."Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain.

If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route.

In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. So unless you're fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career.

By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.

try to figure out the things that drive the whomever you’re talking to and incorporate them into your mental representation of that person. The best way to encourage people to keep you in mind is to keep them in mind.

figure out which things you want to be associated with in people’s heads and be excited about them.