Ever notice how cultural movements peak right when they seem most unstoppable? The moment when everyone’s grandmother is talking about Bitcoin, or your local coffee shop starts accepting Dogecoin, or your aunt who still uses AOL email asks you about NFTs — that’s usually when you should start looking
The numbers tell us what we already feel in our bones: we are a society coming apart at the seams. In 1983, around 75% of 30-year-old Americans had married, nearly half owned homes, and most lived independently with their own families. Forty years later, these pillars of stability have crumbled.
In 1877, Cornelius Vanderbilt had a dying wish: “Keep the money together.” He might as well have asked water to flow uphill. Within a few generations, one of history’s greatest fortunes had largely evaporated. The mansions were demolished or turned into museums. The railroad empire slipped from family control.
You’re given complete control over speech regulation in a small nation. You can either ban all politically controversial speech or allow complete freedom of expression. The choice is yours. The catch? You must choose before knowing which political faction will hold power for the next century. This is essentially
Think about what you’re doing: furiously defending billionaires in Twitter threads, dissecting celebrity breakups like they’re your own family drama, knowing every detail of a streamer’s life down to their coffee order, and fighting endless wars with other fans over people who don’t know you exist.
We need to talk about the doomers and the attention economy they’ve built. Not because they’re entirely wrong — from climate change to political extremism, a lot of their concerns are valid — but because they’ve created something extraordinary: a perpetual motion machine powered by anxiety. Let’s call
A blogger notices something strange about the markets. They write a post about it. No one cares. An economics professor at Princeton notices the blog. Writes a paper. Gets it published. The New York Times runs a story: “Princeton Study Reveals Market Inefficiency.” The Fed chairman cites it in a
A handful of years ago, I visited the Roman Forum in Mérida, Spain. And I found myself contemplating a peculiar fact: I was standing among ruins that had survived longer than most modern nations have existed. These towering columns had watched Spain become Spain, seen the Moors arrive and leave,
Here’s the brutal truth about mainstream success: You either need to be famous already, or you need to be willing to light yourself on fire for attention. That’s it. Those are your options. Yes, there are exceptions, but it largely comes down to those two. This isn’t
A few months ago, I found myself doomscrolling through X (first mistake) when I found a thread about how “everything is getting worse.” The author had assembled an impressive collection of graphs showing declining trust in institutions, rising polarization, increasing mental health issues among teens, and various other metrics of
Social media runs on conflict. This isn’t exactly breaking news — but what’s worth thinking about is how this has spawned an entire class of what we might call “professional conflict entrepreneurs” and their cousins, the “trauma grifters.” These are the folks who have figured out how to monetize
“Once the bear’s hug has got you, it is apt to be for keeps.” — Harold MacMillan A pattern, common to the internet in 2024. Someone has a conflict with a member of Group X. Let’s say they get called out, publicly shamed or — yes — cyberbullied, by right wing