Nikolai Kardashev believed we could classify civilisations by the eneregy they harness. The Soviet Astrophysicist proposed three “Types” of civilisation - Type I controls the energy budget of its homeward, Type II controls a star, and Type III controls a Galaxy. By Kardashev’s measure, the human

I'm told there are now over 4.5 million podcasts in existence.

The industry is worth 40 billion dollars, 158 million Americans tune in monthly, and the medium has finally achieved the kind of cultural ubiquity previously reserved for terrestrial radio or the evening news.

But if you

My year in review:

Some things worked. Some things didn't. The kid grew taller. The work got harder. I wrote the words anyway. Drank the coffee. Paid the rent. Lost a few people. Found myself still here.

That's the year. That's every year. That&

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.) 

The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing is actually the opposite of what you'd expect, a David Brooks meditation on character and virtue, something

SaaS is dead. Punk is dead again, for approximately the four hundredth time since Sid Vicious actually died in 1979. Rock is dead. The novel is dead. Cinema is dead. Blogging is dead. Privacy is dead. Expertise is dead. Irony is dead. 

We have collectively decided that the most

When apps fail, when software breaks, you'll likely encounter a message constructed from a specific vocabulary: "Oops!" "Uh oh!" "Whoops!"

Sometimes you'll get the full nursery treatment: an "Oopsie-daisy" with a sad cartoon robot making a pouty face.

The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. 

We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need. 

We're hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies.

We're hungry and we don't have words to articulate why.

We've built an entire civilization around a single metric: growth. 

GDP must grow. Startups must grow. Your follower count, your revenue, your personal brand, your meditation practice. The theology is unified and cross-functional: more is better, stasis is death, and if you're not expanding you&

I’ve been thinking about why some people can track their progress on goals without going insane, while others turn into the guy who weighs himself four times a day and has a panic attack when his Fitbit dies…

You’d think there’d be some

The conservative commentator Erick-Woods Erickson observed on his Substack this week that Twitter has now convinced large swaths of the American right that Europe has been completely overrun by Muslims, that the United Kingdom is on the verge of becoming an Islamic nation, and that Sweden has fallen.

But reality

One of the great pleasures of my life is a bacon double cheeseburger. The simpler the better. Meat, cheese, a good pickle, a lug of ketchup and some sizzling bacon. There's nothing particularly refined about it. And there's not much I'd choose to eat

I spent most of my twenties believing that purpose was something you found once and then held onto.

A winning lottery ticket you kept in your wallet forever.

The self-help industry reinforced this: find your passion. Discover your why. Land on the thing that makes you leap out of bed

Westenberg Pro

Why Decisions Are More Expensive Than You Think

Before the Baseline Breaks

The Power of Thinking in Bets

Via Charles Broskoski

(And I just launched one)

Westenberg Pro

Kevin Kelly: You Are Not Late

The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things. However the coolest stuff has not been invented yet — although this new greatness will not be more of the same-same that exists today. It will

Is There Still a Return on Being Reasonable?

The Futility of Trying to Tell Your Younger Self Anything Useful

This Guy Shipped Apps Before You Knew What an App Was

Ask Me (Almost) Anything

The Magpie Method = No Method + Every Method

Writing Is Thinking With the Training Wheels Off

There is a moment in nearly every founder's journey when they abandon the elegant for the elaborate. It’s not when they scale past 10 employees or when they land their Series A. It usually happens much earlier, and it starts with a tool.

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