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A chain will always break at its weakest link, and there will always be a weakest link. No matter how tall the walls are, there will always be a snake—one that God can’t even save you from—hiding in your paradise. Fate is called fate precisely because it is unavoidable.

Hamartia, on the surface, may seem like the will of the gods, but dig deeper and you’ll find that it is your own habits—formed by luck, genetics, or conditioning—that determine your ways

If we can’t be immune to the attack of the unknown unknowns, if we can’t prevent unpreventable mistakes, then the best we can do is stomach it…otherwise, don’t try at all.

If your curiosity outweighs your discomfort around risk, write. If the worth of broadcasting your ideas to the world is heavier than the burden of doubt, write. Otherwise, you’re better off doing other things.

The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power.

Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior

The strategy Apple has achieved, as I see it: Pro models: cutting-edge chips, cameras, and materials; will be produced for just one year. Non-pro models: refined architecture using the year-old SoC and older camera systems; will be produced for 2-3 years after their launch year.

Stressing about a problem rarely fixes it. Try to bias towards improving things instead of whining about them. Or if you can’t fix them, forget about them.

It’s never the right time. Any time you catch yourself saying “oh it’ll be a better time later,” you’re probably just scared. Or unclear on what to do. There is never a right time for the big things in life: having kids, changing jobs, breaking up, getting engaged, married, moving in together. And no it’s never an amount of money, either. Err on the side of too early over too late. Related to that point, since there’s never a “right time,” it’s almost always better to do things “too early.” Your conception that it’s too early is just your fear, and once you dive in you’ll figure it out. Old people tend to regret the things they didn’t do, or didn’t do earlier. Not the things they did.

Beware of shadow careers. This idea comes from Steven Pressfield: “Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. The shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us.”

You have more time to build a career than a family. You can complete great work well into your 80s and 90s. If you want to know your grandkids as adults, you only have until your mid 30s to start a family. Every year you spend waiting is another year you lose with your future family.

The time will pass anyway. Maybe it’ll take you five or ten years to succeed at whatever you want to do. Well, those ten years will pass anyway. In ten years you can either have made progress on your goals, or still be whining about how long things take.

Most of the world is held together with duct tape. The last 5-10% of everything seems to get slapped together at the last minute. It’s just hard to see in any area where you aren’t an expert. Don’t worry about living duct-tape-free.

The faster you get something, the faster it tends to go away. Languages, money, influence, friends, the sharper the rise the faster the fall.

Money is a tool for freedom. The best reason to accumulate wealth is to buy yourself freedom from anything you don’t want to do, and the freedom to do the things you do want to do. Money is not an end in itself. If you sit on it and never use it, you’ve wasted your life.

Another water bottle won’t fix your hydration problems. A new note taking tool won’t make you a better writer. If you find yourself looking for a tool to solve a problem, you’re probably just procrastinating.

Host more events. Everyone wants to do more social stuff, but no one wants to organize it. Organize it. It’s not that much work, you’ll be much happier, and you’ll make more friends.

Get physical. Buy real books. Print photos. Write cards. Buy vinyl. Space is how you show yourself and others what you value. Minimalism is a horrible, dull trend. Fill your life with totems to what you care about.

Money can absolutely buy happiness. So long as you spend it on upgrading and expanding the things that make you happy, instead of using it to play status games or on fleeting experiences.

Advice only works in retrospect. You usually have to have experienced a failure or loss to understand the relevant advice. Hearing some piece of advice will rarely stop you from making the related mistake.

Be early. Get on trends early, try new things early, visit places early, learn how to develop the requisite taste to be a little ahead of everyone else. It’s fun and can be profitable.

Embrace the many things you’ll never do. Enjoy saying, “I’ll never learn Chinese,” or “I don’t need to visit every country.” Everything you say no to creates space for the most important things to say yes to.

You can handle more than you think. If you aren’t occasionally failing at things, you’re not pushing yourself. You only need to make a few great decisions per year. You only need to get a few big things right each year and follow through on them. Your life will be shaped by surprisingly few big choices.

No one is crazy. They just have different values and information than you. If you had their life experience, you’d probably think the same. The sooner you embrace this, the sooner you can empathize with people you disagree with instead of pretending you’re superior.

There are four signs your idea has legs:People pay you money: Several people start to pay for your product, ideally people you don’t have a direct connection toContinued usage: People continue to use your prototype product, even if it’s hackyStrong emotion: You’re hearing hatred for the incumbents (i.e. pain) or a deep and strong emotional reaction to your idea (i.e. pull)Cold inbound interest: You’re seeing cold inbound interest in your product

Every prosumer collaboration product, including Figma, Notion, Coda, Airtable, Miro, and Slack, spent three to four years wandering in the dark until they stumbled on something that clicked.

The idea that the future is created by flawed geniuses who happen to accumulate great wealth is outmoded and simplistic, and it encourages a flattened view of how technology is developed and whom it impacts. Just scan the list of sources Isaacson includes in the book: executives, venture capitalists, founders and high-ranking engineers. Yes, Isaacson spoke to “adversaries” like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but not (at least per the list) to line workers, not to Jenna, not to anyone whose family member died in an Autopilot crash, nor anyone who tried to organize a Tesla plant.

the question of whether the past was better than the present, writ large, is useless because we can’t go back to the past. What’s past is gone. But it also isn’t really particularly coherent either. You can always just decompose out various elements and find arguments for what’s better and what’s worse, and in fact, you kind of have to.

I am a huge fan of early experimental cinema – pioneers like Mieles and John Stuart Blackton but also experimental animators like Mary Ellen Bute, Oskar Fischinger, and Len Lye. At the simplest level, I love animation, and I am fascinated with the idea that through animating we bring things to life. In studying these artists' work you can see them exploring the boundaries of what film, a young and nascent medium at that point, can be.

I love to write shader code, which, at a simple level, means you are writing the code at the pixel level – saying, execute this code for this specific pixel to figure out its color. This makes it ideal for light simulation, where you can sort of set up virtual lights, and calculate how the pixel will be lit or what color it should be. I find it a form of painting by light and I like to explore what visual stories we can tell this way. Shader programming is often very free form and improvisational, where you keep changing and seeing what happens and I find I enjoy working in an iterative way with these algorithms.

In teaching I think often my job is to work with folks with an arts background and help introduce computation concepts and computer science / coding into their vocabulary and vice versa, helping folks with a technical background explore how to make art and poetry. I feel like I am helping people cross bridges

Much of the mockery towards Che came from the queer community, who were pretty easily able to see the difference between an authentic representation of a queer character, and a kind of walking diversity checkbox designed to bring a style of woke chaos to a story.

AJLT has clearly been engaged in the criticism of SATC - the three main characters all get a black friend who is given almost equal time and importance. And Che not only answers criticism of lack of representation of sexuality on SATC, but cuts off future criticism of AJLT.

In one scene, Che is watching a focus group give feedback on the pilot of their sitcom. A young, clearly queer member speaks up about how much they hate the “character” of Che in the sitcom. They clearly represent the fan and critical response to Che Diax in AJLT season 1, and it’s fascinating to see what the show thinks these kinds of people are - ie a minorly updated blue haired woke stereotype.

In the show, this brings Che to tears, and through this scene, our criticism of Che is emotionally rebuked. We can see that the tears of Che Diaz are the tears of the writers, appalled at our meanness.

fans are always going to be motivated by different things to the writer. A fan, especially ones with the kind of parasocial relationship to shows and characters that are big these days, are always going to want the best for the character, to see their favourites thrive and find love and get the magic sword, etc. A writer doesn’t and shouldn’t care about any of that - a writer should only be writing the best story, creating the most fulfilling narrative arc. Sometimes, when it comes to crafting a narrative, pain and suffering is important for the character, goals need to be unreached, swords remain in the stone.

Introduced as Carrie’s “modern” podcast partner, and then later Miranda’s queer sexual awakening, Che was a non-binary standup comedian who unfortunately had a lot of functions to fulfil in the story. They were a kind of stand-in to represent exactly everything that had changed in sex and dating and gender and sexuality in the years since the original Sex and The City had gracefully left our screens.

They were a truly baffling character, a kind of frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from hazy ideas of gender and queer theory, mashed into one character to be a comedic foil for the older (and somewhat startlingly conservative at times) original characters - but also as a way to try and seriously engage with ideas of representation and diversity. You never knew if you were meant to laugh at Che, or at the other character’s moments of less-than-wokeness around Che - or take them seriously.

And Just Like That - a show that can only be described as watching Sex and the City through the aged filter on TikTok while suffering a potentially fatal fever - is the greatest show on television. By that I mean it’s so bad. God I love it. It’s just inexplicably confusing, a show defined by big swings that almost never hit, but that doesn’t matter, there’s a kind of deranged joy in that. It’s almost perfect. But it’s also so weird.There seems to be a happy chaos to the show, a willingness to just put forward insane new developments for these beloved characters, and just run with it.

the reason that Che Diaz felt so out of place, a sore thumb, is  because their entire arc in the latest season is responding to fan and critical discourse.

A lot of Americans are underinsured because of genuine hardship, and suffer more than their wealthier counterparts do from uncompensated losses. But lower-income people also suffer disproportionately if coverage isn’t available at all.

In California, insurance companies are prohibited from using statistical modeling to assess future fire risks when setting rates; premium increases must be based on insurers’ loss history, not on the growing likelihood of serious fires.

Jesse Keenan, a Tulane University urban-planning professor who studies climate change and the built environment, expresses some frustration with consumer advocates who view the rising cost of coverage as a “power play” by the industry. “It often is,” he told me. “But what [advocates] don’t acknowledge is the culpability of a lot of different actors—local governments that do not strengthen land and zoning use, state legislators who pass laws making it harder to place obligations on homeowners, and a federal government that writes big, unconditional checks. So there is a lot of blame to go around.”

Pesci and Tomei, on the other hand, create a quirky relationship that I liked. Neither one is played as a dummy. They're smart, in their own ways, but involved in a legal enterprise they are completely unprepared for. Tomei's surprise appearance as an expert witness is a high point, and left me feeling I would like to see this couple again. Maybe in a screenplay that was more focused.

Haigh tells this potentially maudlin story with such a light touch that even its biggest reveals hit like a velvet hammer, and his screenplay so movingly echoes Adam’s yearning to be known — across time and space — that the film always feels rooted in his emotional present, even as it pings back and forth between dimensions.

And so Haigh, in rather overt terms, slowly begins to recontextualize Adam’s sexuality as more of a conduit for his despondency than a root cause, leveraging a personal story about the consequences of keeping pain out into a primordial one about the catharsis of letting it in

“All of Us Strangers” does too, and it never shies away from how hard it can be to start again, especially once Harry begins to struggle with his own advice