Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does

One thing I like to do is make fires. It’s often considered a less socially-acceptable pastime than my other wood-destruction hobbies like writing and woodworking, but each of these ways of killing trees teaches me something vital, and perhaps none is more full of portentous metaphors than building a wood fire in a fireplace or for a campfire....

Email's been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about that today, but you will when you see what they want to do with it. I know you think you have...

I keep having a conversation with people around the tech world about how the industry’s current state of change — especially the potential disruption of incumbents — feels like nothing so much as a cyclical repeat of what we saw in 2004. A generation ago, those of us in tech might talk to our friends or family and hear them say, "I think the ads...

Many people will be familiar with Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, who was one of the most high-profile of the wave of hipster grifters during the 2010s. Today, she's beginning to pivot into some kind of reality TV/competition game show participant, playing on her celebrity, but back in 2016, she was just a person pitching strangers for...

It’s hard to really take in, after all these years, that most people have no memory of the day. The majority of people in the world were either not born, or not old enough to be aware of what was going on, and then many who would recall are either gone or their memories have faded. But I was in New York City on September 11, 2001, and I can say...