Curious Loop

Gas and oil, and opium

Come, walk with me for a while through latent space.

“Second Snowden” Daniel Hale exposed the machinery of America’s clandestine warfare. Why did no one seem to care?

How I turned a dead-end internship into a career-launching experience.

Journey from broke to six figuresThe year was 2008 and we were in the depths of the Great Recession. I had left my job as a Supply Chain Manager for a Xerox subsidiary in Denver, Colorado and moved back in with my parents in Kansas City. It was the fourth

The creator of James Bond had an unremarkable career in intelligence and considered his own books “piffle.”

What does silence mean around the world?

A short guide to bridging the gap between quantitative and qualitative change

The platforms are new, but the form has been around for most of a century.

Photographer Reza Akram spent seven years documenting angampora, an indigenious fighting style banned by British colonizers.

The company they built is wildly successful. But her Washington wisdom didn’t hold up, and neither did their close working relationship.

How did Virgil’s words survive into the present? And how were they once read, during his own life and the succeeding centuries? Alex Tadel explores Graeco-Roman reading culture through one of its best-preserved and most lavishly-illustrated artefacts.

From “The Old Farmer’s Almanac” to “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” what do bestselling guides to self-improvement reveal about the United States?

As a VC at Icon Ventures and a twenty year veteran of productizing and marketing high tech for VMware, Netscape and others, I've always been fascinated by how new technologies emerge and come to market. One of the major artifacts that tries to capture the state of our market and industry each year i

Most American cities find themselves caught in the Growth Ponzi Scheme. We experience a modest, short term illusion of wealth in exchange for enormous, long term liabilities.

I love a merger. You inevitably hear about all the horrible no-good unprofitable customers you were forced to set free. It’s like the high school reunion, where you discover the math nerd is a bitcoin …

Many of us know what it’s like to be in a state of creative flow. Do you have to wait for inspiration to strike, or can you hack ‘the zone’?

Correctors worked long hours, bent over proofs, smeared in thick ink. Scraping by on low wages, they lived alone in...

Two inmates swap making meth for making yoghurt, and turn their product into a prison trading commodity so popular that yoghurt culture is smuggled between prisons.

I‘ve been meaning for some time to write on the subject of writing and procrastination, but there’s always a few other things I just need to get done first. Reading, research, annotating. Following…

Using just her eyes and memory, Elisabeth Bik has single-handedly identified thousands of studies containing potentially doctored scientific images.

The world is a very malleable place. When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, from 11 years old. Vladimir Nabokov published his first book (a collection of poems) at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie

There is so much concrete in the world that soon it will outweigh all living matter – including us.

How much can athletes really make in niche sports? A whole lot more than you might think. Disc golfer Paul McBeth set a new standard by signing an eight-figure endorsement contract—and his deal might only be the beginning.

Using self-mesmerism I felt overtaken on a cellular level by a serene form of concentration. I began to accumulate pages and finish my projects.

Fortunately, David Warren kept working on his crash-proof flight data recorder