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the unsettling reality that in an age where our nation is the wealthiest it’s ever been1, we seem to be set on a dangerous trajectory toward the utter dissolution of any shared commitment to the things that have historically made life worth living — like family, friends, and broader connection

Instead of looking at a large screen at a farther distance, VR users are looking at a smaller screen, much closer to their eyes and magnified by a set of lenses within an optical stack. It’s like looking at a TV through a camera lens—what you’ll see isn’t just determined by the resolution of the screen, but also by the optical properties of the lens, like magnification and sharpness.

instead, we should evaluate the full optical system’s resolution, which is measured in PPD—a combined metric that takes into account the display and optics working together. An angular measurement, PPD measures the number of pixels that are packed within 1° of the field of view (FOV). The higher the PPD, the better the system resolution of the VR headset.

There comes a frustration when you know you're a unique human being who knows some things about the world, but somehow the writing isn't showing that. That's the most maddening thing. That’s the gateway to style, really—to say, "I'm going to accept all those things about me that I normally deny." The way to do that is to see when the prose lights up. If you're writing in a certain mode and the prose is boring, that means you're keeping yourself out of it somehow, whereas when the prose lights up and even you can't help but read your own prose, that means you're letting yourself in.

The working world expects so much of your soul. That’s where our lives are taking place, actually, in the pressure cooker that work makes on our grace.

"I want you to recreate your reading experience. When did you start to love or hate this piece of writing? Go down to the phrase level.” That's actually how it works. If you pick up a book in a bookstore, a book that's gotten a lot of great reviews, written by someone who's one year younger than you, god forbid—you read it, and instantly you're opining about it. That's a really valuable thing for a young writer: what do you really love about prose, and what do you hate about it? It’s maybe the one part of our lives where we get to be so opinionated without being obnoxious.

We have crazily refined micro-opinions about things. That, I think, is the hidden superpower. The pathway to the uniqueness we're talking about is turning down your inner nice guy who’s always trying to like everything. Turn that down, and when you read a bit of prose, watch that little needle flicker. That's where a person's uniqueness lies. If you then make a career of radically honoring those little preferences with every sentence, pretty soon the whole book has your stamp on it, which is ultimately what we're looking for. When I pick up your book, I want you to be there. I want you specifically to be there. And the way you get yourself in there is by those 10,000 micro-choices.

Science and technology are understood to be great because they get you a job, but this very essential human thing of asking, "What are we doing here, and how should I behave?"—that has somehow become considered a bit of an indulgence. And it isn't.

These Russians remind us that a really good story is eternal. That Tolstoy story in the book, “Master and Man,” is about power dynamics. You could easily make that story a commentary about racism, because whatever it is that's actually behind racism, which is power, is totally opened up in that story. I've been trying to think that whatever the pandemic is "teaching" me will come out eventually. It'll come out in some form. It won't be a story about face masks, but somehow it'll be there.

When any person walks into a grocery store, they're basically writing a novel. They see a woman with two little kids, and they make a story up about her, even if they don't realize it. It's called projection. A novel or a short story is not something foreign to us. We do it all the time. We generalize without very much information, and we make assumptions about the world, about, "This is how we stay alive." If we're good at it, we not only stay alive, but we stay alive compassionately, and we become better at being patient with other people. By imagining their circumstances, we make a more spacious universe. That's a skill you have to practice.

if we practice the opposite of it, which I’d argue we practice every time we're on social media about politics—then what we're doing is short-circuiting the process of generous projection. We're projecting hateful caricatures of each other. Obviously that has an effect on our neurology. It makes us more anxious, more nervous, more accusatory, quicker to act.

Now, that moment where I felt drawn to her was every bit as real as the moment where I felt aversion to her. That's a short story. That energy is short-story energy, which is, “I thought I knew her, and I thought I knew what I thought of her. But just by abiding there a little bit, I found out that I was capable of a little bit more.” That's essentially what reading is. It's not a complete antidote, but I think we all could all stand a little more of it. Sometimes you have to act. Sometimes you have to arrest people who go into the Capitol. That's a no-brainer. But even in that process, if you have some fellow feeling for them, you're going to do a better job.

And the last fifty or so years have seen a remarkable shift in how much hard vs. soft power the average parent can wield over their children in this country — the forces of tradition, public opinion, corporal punishment, and economic influence that once operated primarily in parental favor have largely declined, such that the ability to command has often given way to mere suggestion, hope, insinuation, persuasion, bargaining, attraction, or wheedling.

My therapist attributes this to childhood emotional neglect and authoritarian parenting on the part of my father. My father is an emotionally-repressed narcissist who has never taken an active role in my life. He gaslit me, shamed me, criticized me. He constantly called me lazy, ungrateful, entitled. Sure, he met my material needs, but there was no emotional intimacy, acceptance, or love.

The second letter-writer seems to think that too many young people today consider estrangement too lightly. I am biased in the other direction, and think that most people, by the time they get around to writing to me on the subject, have agonized over the possibility of estrangement for ages, and even tried to put it off for as long as they can possibly bear it.

Were I being asked for advice by a parent in such a situation, I would encourage them to grant the child their space — even someone who cruelly or unreasonably ends a relationship ought to have that boundary respected; nothing good can be gained from repeated begging — to mourn their loss with sympathetic and supportive listeners, to build up strength and comfort in other areas of their life, and to leave the door open in hope of a possible reconciliation in the future.

Perhaps most interesting is that this letter-writer is not (yet, at least) faced with the possibility of a family estrangement. She is faced with instead quite the opposite — it sounds like one of her children very badly wants to have a conversation about how their parents relate to them, and desires a closer emotional connection with at least one of them.

Accepting the possibility that one may have hurt a child even with the best of intentions is not the same as saying, “You’re right, I’m [or in this case, your father] the worst parent in the world, I did everything wrong and you did everything right; you’re good and I’m bad.”

Perhaps it was not necessary to set aside one’s entire emotional personhood in order to bring home a family wage!

The important point is that it doesn’t matter how much each domain of your life contributes to your needs, as long as your needs are somehow met by one or more of all the different roles you play in life.

The political right sees a war between barbarous foreigners and a civilized America. The left sees a war between economic classes, or among a multitude of identity groups fighting to oppress each other.

Our economy is based on companies competing with each other in the marketplace. But if you think that employees in the same company will cooperate for the good of the organization then you haven’t been paying attention to this very blog: organizations merely set the stage for a Darwinian contest in which sociopaths possessing the will to win oppress the clueless and exploit the losers

If you don’t spend your time thinking of ways to exploit people you’re probably a loser too

The two ways of being similar reinforce each other. When people go after the same prizes, they will develop similar skills in the pursuit. When people’s skills don’t set them apart, the will try to stand out by competing ever more desperately for the common prizes.

Game theory distinguishes between zero-sum games which are purely adversarial and positive-sum games which allow for cooperation. “Zero-sum” means that any gain for one player means a loss for the other players. In a zero-sum game there are no win-win possibilities and thus no point in trying to cooperate.

a positive-sum game involves a collaborative effort to which many players can contribute. Players bake a bigger pie by cooperating. In positive-sum games, the entrance of new participants is either bad or good for the incumbents, depending on the situation.

strong players have more room to cooperate, while weaker players are forced to compete with each other.

Competing against stronger students can have demoralizing effects that persist long after school is over. This isn’t the case for the student who is much smarter than her peers. She welcomes stronger classmates. They improve her learning opportunities and increase the overall prestige of the university, without being a threat.

But for avoiding competition, having unique skills isn’t half as important as having unique desires. The philosopher René Girard described the mimetic contagion of desire: people instinctively imitate the desires of those around them, which leads to everyone chasing the same prizes.

Once people enter college, they get socialized into group environments that usually continue to operate in zero-sum competitive dynamics. These include orchestras and sport teams; fraternities and sororities; and many types of clubs. The biggest source of mimetic pressures are the classes. Everyone starts out by taking the same intro classes; those seeking distinction throw themselves into the hardest classes, or seek tutelage from star professors, and try to earn the highest grades

software gives you its own set of abstractions and basic vocabulary with which to understand every experience. It sort of smells like mathematics in some ways. But software’s way of looking at the world is more about abstractions modeling underlying complexities in systems; signal vs. noise; scale and orders of magnitude; and information — how much there is, what we can do it with, how we can learn from it and model it. Software’s interpretation of reality is particularly important because software drives the world now, and the people who write the software that runs it see the world through this kind of “software’s worldview” — scaling laws, information theory, abstractions and complexity. I think over time I’ve come to believe that understanding this worldview is more interesting than learning to wield programming tools.

. 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?