Muad’Dib. Photo by Jack Davison A beginning is a very delicate time. Last month, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama drove to the San Francisco residence of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman and hurled a Molotov cocktail at its gate. Hours later, he arrived at OpenAI’s headquarters and attempted to…
Juan B. Ramírez
A few weeks ago, a friend called me at 01:40 AM. Not texted. Called. For a brief second, my body prepared itself for bad news. Adulthood has conditioned most of us to believe that late-night calls only arrive carrying catastrophe. Someone in the hospital. Someone stranded. Someone dead. But nothing…
Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with…
Bear Mountain Bridge in New York, via Wikipedia. Many folks, including me, have observed that it seems to take much longer to build infrastructure in the US than it used to. People point to things like the rapid construction of the Empire State Building (one year) or the Golden Gate Bridge (just…
Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai* is utterly unlike any other book I've ever read. *Which came out three years before the completely unrelated Tom Cruise vehicle, I'll have you know! Initially published in 2000 to some acclaim, the novel has picked up a reputation since its 2016 reprinting as being…
In April 1941, while the Luftwaffe was still bombing London nightly, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein began the treatment of a ten-year-old boy in the Scottish highland town of Pitlochry. Like the Pevensie children in The Chronicles of Narnia, ‘Richard’, as Klein referred to her little patient, had…
You've probably heard someone say something to the effect of "renting is just throwing your money away". Don't believe it. It's a glib statement that simply isn't true. There are so many hidden costs to home ownership that most people who have never owned a home don't know about. If you want to make…
Fiction In “The Palm House,” Gwendoline Riley offers understated yet cleareyed observations of human behavior — this time about middle-aged Londoners struggling to stay relevant. Credit...Sebastian Wells/Ostkreuz, via Redux April 21, 2026 AmazonApple BooksBarnes & NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshop.org…
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Shouts & Murmurs October 10, 2020 Photograph from Alamy Here they are—the six things that millennials have in common with America’s favorite radio psychiatrist, Frasier Crane. As a quick heads-up, No. 5 is going to punch you in the gut so hard you’ll piss blood. 1. He was a foodie. That’s right,…
we’re still doomed RIP social media. What comes next is messy. As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair? Jennifer Ouellette – May 7, 2026 10:51 AM | 334 Credit: D3Damon/Getty Images Credit: D3Damon/Getty Images Story text Size Width *…
I’m not a car person, but I have friends who have fancy BMWs, and they have to go to their fancy BMW place to fix their car, because BMW parts are often very specific to BMWs. So what does it mean for higher ed when all the parts are interchangeable? Almost forty per cent of students transfer at…
Takes I don’t expect ever to fully understand my desire to hold on to those two doomed cowboys in the most literal way possible. February 24, 2025 October 13, 1997 New Takes on the classics. Throughout our centennial year, we’re revisiting notable works from the archive. Sign up to receive them…
DOWNLOADS Every organization aspires for its transformation to deliver sustainable impact. But achieving that outcome requires more than just a vision; it demands rigor.1“How to gain and sustain a competitive edge through transformation,” McKinsey, October 16, 2023. Rigor is the disciplined…
A project. One year ago, I wrote a post entitled “Everyone I know is worried about work.” Unfortunately, it has aged very well. In the last few months, more and more people with white collar jobs — or perhaps it’s more accurate to just say laptop jobs — feel insecure in their positions, unsure of…
How Ben Lerner reinvented the social novel for a hyper-self-obsessed age. Elinor Carucci for The New York Times To Decode White Male Rage, First HeHad to Write in His Mother’s Voice How Ben Lerner reinvented the socialnovel for a hyper-self-obsessed age. By GILES HARVEY OCT. 8, 2019 One evening in…
Epistemic status: Completely schizo galaxy-brained theory Lightcone operates on a "generalist" philosophy. Most of our full-time staff have the title "generalist", and in any given year they work on a wide variety of tasks — from software development on the LessWrong codebase to fixing an…
In March 1991, Robert Rodriguez, then 22 years old, decided to write and shoot three feature-length home movies to gain experience making full-length films, in case he ever received an offer to direct a real one. Nine months later, having finished El Mariachi, the first part of his planned trilogy,…
Books With “Transcription,” the writer makes a case for the vitality of the form. Listen · 15:23 min Credit...Photo illustration by Ben Denzer April 3, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda. Add The New…
Published March 5, 2026 The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm. Every founder building an AI tool is asking the same question: what happens when the next version of Claude makes my product a feature? They’re right to worry. If you sell the tool, you’re in a…
Transcription Sasha Frere-Jones In Ben Lerner’s fourth novel, the dilemma of a broken phone powers a story about consciousness and connection. Transcription, by Ben Lerner, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 130 pages, $25 • • • For Ben Lerner, panic obtains. In his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station…
—Kismet Spiritual Digest—Paul McAdory spends a week reading Adam Phillips’s The Life You Want, a psychoanalytic and literary foray into our innermost desires, and does what he can to achieve the life he wants. Or something like it. “Complying is what we do when desiring seems too dangerous or too…
There is a pattern to the most influential business writing, in The World is Flat league. Especially writing that CEOs seem to like enough to exhort their organizations to read. Every such work offers one big, unqualified, unquantified, universal proposition. Usually with an obvious black-and-white…
In our latest issue, we featured Jesse Barron’s essay ‘Transference in the Afternoon’, which explored the ongoing lawsuit between Michael Pollack, a former hedge fund manager, and his therapist, Heidi Kling. Pollack and Kling maintained a sexual relationship for a decade, from 2011 to 2021. In the…
Known as a D.J. at one of Berlin’s most storied clubs, she swerved with an LP of dreamy pop. Now she’s back, cataloging the angst of 30-something creative life. Known as a D.J. at one of Berlin’s most storied clubs, she swerved with an LP of dreamy pop. Now she’s back, cataloging the angst of…
We often talk about “technical debt” on our podcast and in this newsletter. Technical debt is shorthand for all those slow, bulky software systems and tools that you’ve been living with for years that are just too expensive to replace. Let’s coin a new phrase: Procedural debt. Procedural debt has…
He had a long career as a scholar of French literature, but he was best known for his writings on gay identity at the height of the AIDS crisis. Leo Bersani speaking in Berlin in 2015. His earliest writing examined modern French literature; he later became known for his studies of gay…
Annals of Inquiry Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system’s mind—examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch. February 9, 2026 It has become increasingly clear that Claude’s selfhood, much like our own, is a…
A lesson in leadership by Satya Nadella When I was Promoted to Technical Fellow, I was “invited to the room”, joining Microsoft’s other Senior Executives. It was really something. Achieving the Senior Executive status is often mistaken for a comfortable reward, a final destination with enhanced…
Notebooks February 3, 2026 Themes: Books, Culture In a post-literate world, reading is treated more like an assumed good than a skill to be actively practised. Vintage illustration of a man sitting on a pile of books. Credit: Walker Art Library Attention dilemmas focus on the dramatic loss of the…
Society made you think that having multiple interests was a weakness. Go to school. Get a degree. Get a job. Retire at some point. But there is so much wrong with that sequence of events. We don’t live in the Industrial Age anymore. Specializing in one skill is almost certain death. I feel like we…
Guest Essay Jan. 10, 2026 Credit...Vivian Dehning Listen to this article · 15:46 min Learn more In our anxious age, increasing attention is being directed to our attention, and to the extraordinary and seemingly inescapable forces trying to exploit it. In one recent survey, 75 percent of respondents…
In the late spring of 2012, the cash from my advance for The Burning House photobook was running low and I was in no mood to return to anything resembling a traditional office. I was less than a year into living in my van, had just fallen in love with surfing empty point breaks in Baja and was…
Part Of From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet see all updates David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. If you want to win in AI — and I mean win in…
When I joined Google ~14 years ago, I thought the job was about writing great code. I was partly right. But the longer I’ve stayed, the more I’ve realized that the engineers who thrive aren’t necessarily the best programmers - they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to navigate everything around the…
In his essay ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Borges wrote that the Argentine writer, and the South American writer, by virtue of being distant and close at the same time, had more ‘rights’ to Western culture than anyone in any Western nation. He went on to explore the extraordinary…
The last music festival I attended before COVID was Hopscotch in September 2019. The Stereogum staff rented a house together in Raleigh, and we spent a long weekend bouncing between the big outdoor stages and venues around town. We were supposed to catch one of the first ever Purple Mountains…
We're more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works? Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So,…
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. If you read a book in 2025—just one book—you belong to an endangered species. Like honeybees and red wolves, the population of American readers, Lector americanus, has been declining for decades. The most…
Profesor de español en la Ferris State University, en el estado de Miehigan de Esta dos Unidos, es autor de varios libros y ar tículos sobre la poesía hispanoamericana contemporánea, particularmente la mexi cana y la paraguaya. Así mismo ha residi do y enseñado en el Perú, en México y en España. En…
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