#Commentary

Piketty’s Eco-Marxist Utopia: Why Degrowth and Global Redistribution Will Trap the Poor in Poverty

I turned my website into a personal social network that connects to Bluesky and the Fediverse—here’s how.

I'm tired of posting on so many different social networks, so I built my own. All it took was a WordPress website, two plugins, and a lot of fiddling.

How to use AI without stagnating

Are you metaphorically driving a car while pretending to run a marathon?

I’m So Sad You Didn’t Think You Could Tell Your Father And Me You Were The Santa Fe Slasher

Our devices are exhausting us

I'm no longer working with Lifehacker, which is disappointing. But I'm grateful I got to spend two years doing one of my favorite things: finding great indie and open source tools and sharing them wit…

Pips and the art of feeling good about being wrong

In the short term, being confidently wrong about something feels just as good as actually being correct.

The peace that’s available

We're told we live in unprecedented times, and there's truth to that. It's worth remembering, though, that it's all a little less unprecedented than it feels. The last track on Simon and Garfunkel's 1…

What’s worth saying right now?

Lately I've been wanting to write a newsletter and realizing that, for the most part, I don't feel like I have much to say. I sometimes wonder if it's depression, but I'm not sure it is. My life is pr…

The only way I’ve managed to catch my own typos

Anyone who has ever edited me will tell you I have a few...quirks. My worst habit is leaving unfinished sentences it the end of my ...paragraphs. Like that. I regularly do this without noticing, even …

Mark Zuckerberg Is A Digital Narcotics Dealer

In a recent newsletter I referred to Mark Zuckerberg as a digital narcotics dealer, which readers seemed to enjoy. I briefly wondered if I was overstating the matter until I read about how schools are…

Did Twitter’s design inevitably led us to Brexit and Trump?

Last week we talked about how mediums—like film and novels—have their own built-in rules, and how those rules necessarily shape the way you can tell stories and express ideas. We made this point, natu…

The Tom Bombadil theory of media literacy

One of the most profound lessons you can learn about media literacy is that it isn't enough to talk about the content—you need to talk about the medium. People far smarter than me have written books a…

YouTube and the end of “internet culture”

Last week YouTube officially announced that the trending page is going away, to be replaced with separate trending pages just for music, podcasts, and movie trailers. It's the end of "internet culture…

Do it anyway.

I hate running. I used to believe that, over time, this would change. I thought, over time, that I would grow to love running out of sheer repetition. This has not happened. I used to think that if I …

How to bring democracy to America

Imagine that you, as a philanthropist or activist who wants to help spread democracy across the world, read about a country described as a "flawed democracy.” The report describes the problems that co…

The hardest thing I do every week (and how I do it)

​​I write a lot. I've finished just shy of 150 articles so far this year between Lifehacker, PopSci, WIRED, and PCMag, an average of 25 articles a month. I love it. The best part of being a freelancer…

Tech is making things easier—just not for you

"Technology makes everything more complicated," an elderly relative said to me. It's hard to argue with. In this specific situation she had paid to reserve a parking spot that, it turned out, she didn…

Mark Zuckerberg sees loneliness as a market opportunity

The internet used to be exciting—its potential to make the world better seemed endless. In the early 2010s it felt inevitable that innovation would make us happier, more productive, more connected, an…