Author: eliotpeper

• Writing is a tool for making new ideas

  Over in Every, I wrote about how writing is more than a method for capturing ideas, it’s a way of exploring them:

  By externalizing your thoughts, writing puts you into conversation with yourself. It’s always easier to diagnose other

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• The beauty of playing the long game

  Over in the Boston Globe, I wrote about the surprising power of playing long games:

  I love projects with multi-decade timelines. They defy the limiting logic of quarterly earnings, KPIs, conversion rates, and all the other metrics that

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• The Four Laws of Making a Website*

  1. If you hire the best person in the world to build you something custom, it might be expensive, but it’ll be perfect for you.
  2. If you use a proven off-the-shelf product, it might not do everything you want, but it’ll

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• Concept Art

  I love concept art because it isn’t the thing, it’s meant to inform the thing.

  

  It’s not complete, it’s suggestive.

  

  It doesn’t tell a story, it creates a vibe.

  

  Instead of illustrating what happens next, it seeks maximally resonant images.…

• Wizards Meddling In the Source Code of Life

  Fiction is a uniquely capable vehicle for exploring the power and consequences of new technologies, grounding thought experiments in human experience and playing out second and third order effects. In his new science-fiction thriller, Upgrade, Blake Crouch imagines a …

• Writing Reap3r

  

  Big news: My new novel, Reap3r, comes out today.

  How far would you go to achieve your greatest ambition?

  Nothing is what it seems in this speculative thriller about a quantum computer scientist, virologist, podcaster, venture capitalist, and assassin …

• The most useful, beautiful, and dangerous of humanity’s inventions

  Over in the Adjacent Possible, Rick Liebling interviewed me about writing Bandwidth:

  Planes are computers we fly in. Stoves are computers we cook on. Buildings are computers we inhabit. Nearly every manufactured object has a chip in it,

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• What Writers Do

  Imagine you’re holding a laser pointer.

  You can point it at anything you want: a potted cactus, the Diophantine Equation scrawled across a whiteboard, the steaming cross section of a fresh baked croissant, a malfunctioning karaoke machine, a whorled knob …

• Refracting Reality Into Rainbows of Possibility

  I interviewed Monica Byrne about writing The Actual Star, an epic tale of self-discovery that spans millennia and questions the very meaning of civilization. Born of extensive research into Maya history and culture, this wildly ambitious speculative adventure will …

• Narrative as Crowbar

  Over in Future, I wrote about unlocking expertise through storytelling:

  People have wandered the intellectual garden of forking paths for thousands of generations, but the internet is a profound accelerant for such cultural exploration. It is a shadow city

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