Category: essays

• 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…

• Chapter 0

  Whether you make books, music, software, or sandwiches, how you describe what you make is a crucial part of how other people experience it. Some authors submit their manuscript and expect their publisher to handle the rest. But a book’s cover, dust-jacket copy, and marketing materials are promises to the reader about the journey on…

• How to make sense of complex ideas

  You know that feeling when someone is explaining an idea and you’re struggling to make sense of it—like peering out into dense fog, hoping to glimpse the outline of an approaching ship? Maybe it’s because they’re using unfamiliar acronyms or taking leaps of logic, or maybe it’s simply not something you have any personal experience…

• How Reading Books Instead Of News Made Me A Better Citizen

  In this new essay for Techdirt, I share an “attention experiment” I conducted during the 2016 election that was life-changing—and ultimately inspired the Analog Series. The lessons I learned from it feel uncomfortably relevant today. Here’s a taste: Reading was no longer an exercise in rubbernecking and literature armed me to face the challenges of…