For the last few months, there's been a lot of conversation around the "Department" of Government Efficiency, which is ostensibly an effort at improving government efficency, with a primary narrative being around government spending. This...

One thing I like to do is make fires. It’s often considered a less socially-acceptable pastime than my other wood-destruction hobbies like writing and woodworking, but each of these ways of killing trees teaches me something vital, and perhaps none...

Email's been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about...

I keep having a conversation with people around the tech world about how the industry’s current state of change — especially the potential disruption of incumbents — feels like nothing so much as a cyclical repeat of what we saw in 2004. A generation...

Many people will be familiar with Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, who was one of the most high-profile of the wave of hipster grifters during the 2010s. Today, she's beginning to pivot into some kind of reality TV/competition game show...

It’s hard to really take in, after all these years, that most people have no memory of the day. The majority of people in the world were either not born, or not old enough to be aware of what was going on, and then many who would recall are either...

As I write this, we’ve just heard news that Oprah is planning to do a big broadcast special about AI and society. Despite the fact that it hasn’t aired, and I haven’t seen it or talked to anyone who’s seen it, we can reliably predict many of the...

A lot of the ways that the ultra-wealthy think about, and act about, money seem almost incomprehensible to those outside of their orbit. Having had a chance to get some visibility into how a number of billionaires and centimillionaires think and...

Okay, previously we covered many of the most common things you'd want to know about a board of directors at an organization, including the basics like what a board actually does. Next up, I put out a prompt on my various social media channels to...

Nearly every organization that is designed to have impact has a board of directors, whether that's a small non-profit, or a giant corporation, or anything in between. But having served on a number of boards across that entire range of institutions, I...

You might have noticed, it’s not a super fun time to be in the publishing industry, especially if you’re trying to do journalism. The years-long drumbeat of bad news issuing from nearly every newsroom has left people understandably despairing about...

When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start...