Category: culture

• 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 with billions of residents. Everyone has a voice, even if nobody listens. Yes, there are assholes…

• Ideas aren’t unique, execution is

  In his seminal book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly notes that while we celebrate Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the same theory of evolution around the same time, both of them inspired by Thomas Malthus’s ideas about population growth. Likewise, Albert Einstein is history’s archetypal genius, yet the same year he…

• Literary leverage

  As a writer, it’s important to remember that only a tiny percentage of people read, far fewer read full articles instead of just headlines, fewer still read books, and—even if it’s a massive hit—only a minuscule fraction of those rarified few will read your book. Knowing that you will never reach everyone frees you to…

• Stories are Trojan Horses for ideas

  Stories are Trojan Horses for ideas, a metaphor that proves its own point. Composed thousands of years ago—initially in Homer’s Odyssey and later in Virgil’s Aeneid—Odysseus’s gambit still reverberates through our culture, evolving as it leaps from mind to mind, seeding generation after generation with images, archetypes, and ways of making sense of the world. You…

• Yogurt

  Ten years ago, my wife and I had a quirky neighbor named Dell. He taught us to make our own yogurt and the results were so delicious that we’ve made it weekly ever since and taught friends to do the same. We just found out that Dell passed away two years ago. It’s profoundly bittersweet…

• Narrative daisy-chains

  We all know that stories sometimes go viral, apotheosizing into memes. But much more interesting than a single story propagating itself through retelling is when stories inspire the telling of other stories in a cascading cultural daisy-chain. What anecdote can you share with a friend that inspires them to share an anecdote of their own,…

• A pop band that talks about complicated emotions

  “At the heart of Sylvan Esso is this really fun argument —Nick wants things to sound unsettling, but I want you to take your shirt off and dance,” says Amelia Meath of the band she cofounded in 2012 that now boasts two million monthly listeners on Spotify. “We’re trying to make pop songs that aren’t on…

• Making machines human-readable

  The widening gap in basic computer literacy is dangerous. As software eats the world, it becomes ever more important for nontechnical people to grok the fundamentals of how computers work. Users and policy-makers don’t need to be able to read code, but they need to understand its implications or we’ll wind up with counterproductive laws…

• Imagining the future

  On May 21st, I’ll be joining Marija Gavrilov to discuss how to think like a science-fiction writer: Imagination and storytelling in times of crisis are powerful vectors for activating change. We’ll come together with science-fiction writers in a semi-bookclub format to discuss imagination, possible futures, and better worlds. The first session is with Eliot Peper,…

• Kim Stanley Robinson on how we live in a science fiction novel that we’re writing together

  From The Coronavirus is Rewriting Our Imaginations: These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that…