Personal growth, career, and daily reflections.
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctl…
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of o…
At the hazy dawn of the twentieth century, through the byways of mental meandering and mathematical play, Albert Einstein arrived at a revelation about the nature of the universe while working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office — a new relationship between…
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a…
In the activist-app-maker scene of the 2010s, I was the guy handed the unsavory job of “make enough money to keep everyone else’s ramen-eating hovel artist commune lifestyle afloat.”
"We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship."
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that prope…
Data science team succession is tricky when the models are used for a small number of high-stakes decisions. Did Liverpool get this wrong post Ian Graham?
La Grande Plage à Biarritz, Jacqueline Marval, 1923
It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom ho…
"In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism."
"Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love."
This essay is adapted from Traversal and continues the story of the making of Leaves of Grass. With Leaves of Grass already printed — by a Brooklyn friend, at the poet’s own expense — Whitman had only to find a willing distributor who would root this uncommon…
"You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love."
"Come with me. I'll teach you the flowers and the stars."
"If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others."
"If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God... he does not come to us from books, he lives within us... This God is in you too. He is most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing."
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity."
A practical guide to filing your taxes on Elster as an app developer in Germany, covering the three forms you need to submit every year.
The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geometries of blue, black, and white, interlocking extraordinary pre…
The Takshashila Institution has made public a whole bunch of skills, based on their public policy research and writing over the years. I take a few for a spin.
Greetings dear readers.
What makes AI art art? When does AI become a tool in the hand of the artist, and not the creator itself? The answer lies in "one touch"!
"Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds."
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky pl…
The Commissioner Crisis is real.
One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the…