Cereal Has Strayed Too Far
How breakfast became dessert
The revolt of the reader
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life.
And because reading is important to me, writing is too: writing not only allows us to convey our ideas, but the very act forces us to test and distill them — at once making our ideas more robust while providing the vehicle by which to share them.
VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Skipping alignment leads to zero-impact UX
Deliverable artifacts are only a small part of the social system that product development entails. Any "productivity" gained by ignoring that system is an illusion.
Imagine that we are roommates. You ask me to restock the toilet paper. To prove that I’ve done so, I show you the receipt.
The next morning, when you are in need of toilet paper, you find that the drawer is empty. This is because I have invented a new and innovative method that I call Lean Shopping
Inside the Tent on “The Great British Bake Off” | The New Yorker
archived 29 Aug 2025 22:45:03 UTC
The End of Handwriting
For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad?
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.
A stress hormone like cortisol, on the other hand, has a half-life of 60–90 minutes and so can take up to 6 hours to fully clear out after the onset of an acute stressor. This means that if we switch what we focus on more often than, say, every 30 minutes, our system will be more or less decohered—different parts will be “attending to” different aspects of reality
Se faire avaler par la machine
La publication scientifique est encore aujourd’hui la condition sine qua non pour établir une carrière universitaire.
"AI First" and the Bus Factor of 0 - MindFlash - Programming and more
"AI first" leaves humans nowhere. Learn about the Bus Factor and how the launch of ChatGPT has changed the landscape on knowledge sharing.
How I Solved the Century-Old Mystery of a Miraculous Shipwreck Survivor | The Walrus
In a disaster worse than the Titanic, it was believed a young man swam over six kilometres to safety. It didn’t add up
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.
The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when it should be the other way around.
The more different you are from the average user, the more the benefits of customization outweigh the benefits of professional polish.
Also, spreadsheets often have a scrappy aesthetic. It can feel safer to change a spreadsheet, compared to the pixel-perfect polish of a professionally designed application
The key is that many customizations are accessible to amateurs, with reasonable incremental investments of learning and skill. A gentle slope also supports smoother collaboration between people of different skill levels.
Make a Damn Website
By centralizing not just your content, but yourself, on these sites, you rob yourself the opportunity to be more authentically you.
Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain
Working with and living in spatially complex environments may help delay cognitive decline, though more research is needed.
Let Me And A Food Scientist Sample The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing A Small Canadian Town | Defector
Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St.…
Please Return to Your Seat
On the long haul flight
How to survive boiling water
A probiotic paradox
Shamelessness as a strategy
I’ve enjoyed playing a game called Avalon recently. I won’t go too far into the rules, but it’s a hidden role game in the vein of Secret Hitler or Werewolf, where one team is “good”, trying to uncover who among them is “evil”, before the evil team wins.
Why the super rich are inevitable
Why some mathematicians argue the economy is designed to create a few super rich people – unless we stop it.
Engineered Addictions
How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention - and relationships
Never Enough
Comparison is the thief of joy.
95 reasons for having your own website
A running list of reasons to have your own website in 2026.
Who Goes MAGA?
With apologies to Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay in Harper’s, “Who Goes Nazi?” remains a worthwhile read on the cultural archetypes of who is drawn to fascism, and who would never go down such …
Her path to MAGA was predictable: someone whose entire identity is built on being special, on having secret knowledge that others lack, was always going to fall for conspiracy theories. The wellness-to-fascism pipeline is real, and she’s already at the destination.
His MAGA turn will come when he finally admits what’s been obvious all along: he’s more comfortable with the right than the left. He’ll frame it as a principled stand against progressive extremism, but really it’s just the natural conclusion of a grift that started with “I’m just asking questions.”
The pattern is clear once you know what to look for. MAGA appeals to people who need to feel special, who need enemies to blame, who need simple answers to complex problems. It attracts those who mistake confidence for competence, who confuse being loud with being right, who think that admitting uncertainty is weakness.
It offers them a way to feel righteous about their resentments, patriotic about their prejudices, and principled about their selfishness.
Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis
yup, still thinking about it
The Lost Joy of Music Piracy: WhatCD, Oink, and Spotify | Pigeons and Planes
What.CD, Oink, and the banalities of streaming.
The Spotify model is like saying your favorite restaurant should just be giving you free food until you decide to buy a t-shirt.
We’ve discovered a new kind of magnetism. What can we do with it? | N…
archived 15 Jul 2025 21:06:08 UTC
Concept Colors — Quiz
Pick a color for each abstract concept.
Face it: you're a crazy person
OR: why your brain needs a boxcutter
Start from a corner of the room
Sometimes when the house is a shambles and there is stuff everywhere I can find the idea of tidying overwhelming. This is because my brain wants to figure out the most efficient way to do the process. I want to know the best place/way to start and because I can’t figure that out I struggle to start at all.
When I start mentally “spinning” like this, I use the strategy of just starting in one corner of a room, and moving across to the other side, putting each thing away in the order it appears on the floor. It most likely is not the most efficient way to tackle the room, I undoubtably do a lot of unnecessary walking back and forth between places, making it take longer. But it’s easy for my brain and body to follow, no overthinking required. Eventually, the task is complete!
This strategy can be applied to other, digital spaces, too. Email inbox: start at the top and keep moving down to the bottom. Same goes for cards on a kanban board, or a list of tasks in a task manager. There’s probably better, more efficient, more sophisticated systems for getting the work done, yes. But you’re far better off making some traction than being stuck, unable to move forward because you’re unable to decide how to start.
We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It
Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life
Oh Good, Screwworms Are Back
You say you want to know more about the horror bug that we eradicated only to discover it is making a comeback? You are in luck.
but no victory is so complete that it can not be undone by a handful of careless middle managers who don’t grasp the importance of the system they have been charged with maintaining.