[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.] [Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on Facebook who has since become somewhat famous. I’ve renamed him here to “Andrew Cord” to protect his identity.]…

Lovecraftian monsters really do exist. There are vast burning demons, things from far beyond our tiny world, things that you can’t even look at without going incurably mad. A being that is absolutely here but whose immenseness extends out into the cosmic distance of a fevered incomprehension. The…

“I don’t know how to be human any more.” On a wretched December afternoon in 2015, as raindrops pattered a planetary threnody on grayed-out streets, five thousand activists gathered around Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, hoping to force world leaders to do something, anything, that would save the future.…

Leaving Conservatism Behind Leaving Conservatism Behind ▪ Summer 2016 The abandoned International Boiler Works, East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania (Nicholas A. Tonelli) “You see that factory, Matt?” my father would say to me, as we passed a drab building in his pickup truck. “Every time I drive…

This is a guest post by Jacob Falkovich . Our world is filled with competition, frenzied ambition in every domain. In Western nations, and above all in the United States, it animates not only economic and financial life, but scientific research and intellectual life as well. Despite the tension and…

Erik (HASH) Hersman We generally admit that humility is a virtue and ego is a vice. Yet this black and white definition is made complicated by the fact that any sensible person would also admit that confidence is important. We’d say it’s more than important—we know that confidence is essential.…

It's easy to get into Confederate Facebook. Just go to a news article about a police shooting and scroll down to the comments. Most comment sections are linked to people's Facebook accounts, so you just have to find someone with a Confederate flag avatar expressing a racist opinion, click through to…

I believe that moods (or less colloquially, states of mind) can be used not just defensively , making the best of whatever mood you’re in (as I described in Productivity for Precious Snowflakes ). They can also be used offensively , to proactively create the conditions for rapid acceleration and…

image via Alexey Kljatov By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs We’ve been told for years now that what our parents and kindergarten teachers told us is not, in fact, true — we are not each and every one of us special unique snowflakes destined for greatness. In this essay I want to offer a new theory of…

When writing Ecce Homo in the late 1880s, Nietzsche sought to resurrect the Voltairean spirit in Europe, which he felt by his times had been washed away by pessimistic Romanticism. “Voltaire still comprehended umanità in the Renaissance,” Nietzsche wrote, “the cause of taste, of science, of the…

I searched for “vim directory structure” many times online and have rarely found something that helps me out. Generally I’m looking for the right place to put some random .vim file that I downloaded or which directory to put indentation or file type recognizer files. To compile this information, I…

Just three years ago, in 2014, I wrote a little short story set in a future where most work is organized around blockchains. That story was set sometime past the 2120s, but it appears we’ll get there a century earlier than I thought. The idea of organizing work through smart contracts on blockchains…

After eavesdropping on a thousand Twitter arguments and reading just as many thinkpieces, I’ve noticed that there are two main ways of conceptualizing community governance. Both are normative. Both primarily arise when it comes to conflicts over free speech — or who it’s okay to punch. A glitched…

This is a guest post by Mike Travers, who develops software at Collaborative Drug Discovery , blogs on diverse topics at Omniorthogonal , collects his random hacks at Hyperphor , and has a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences . The scientific picture of the world has some disturbing implications when its…

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal . Are ordinary people really populations of interests rather than something more solid? It’s disturbing to think of yourself as so fluid, so potentially unstable, held together only by the shifting influence of available…

Terry Bisson, 1991 Someone did a radio play of this... "They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "Meat. They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're…

Humans naturally think about their own behaviors in terms of peak and trough performance levels, rather than means or medians. Without any performance tracking, we know our limits in a variety of domains. Each time we attempt a performance episode in any skilled domain, these limits change, yielding…

This is a guest post by Taylor Pearson. “[M]ental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” –Viktor Frankl The healthy state of humans is mild…

(Originally published at Ribbonfarm .) Here's a recipe for discovering new ideas: Examine the frames that give structure (but also bias) to your thinking. Predict, on the basis of #1, where you're likely to have blind spots. Start groping around in those areas. If you can do this with the very…

Being pretty self-taught as far as UI design goes, I’ve always wondered why so many articles and books talk about color theory and palettes. In my experience, using a “split complementary palette” is about 0% predictive of me making nice-looking designs. I have another word for that sort of thing:…

John Dewey, the 20th Century educational philosopher, wrote a book called ‘Art as Experience,’ which has been largely forgotten by history. It happens to contain a more-or-less complete philosophy of aesthetics, the comprehensiveness and usefulness of which has never been matched. Dewey’s writing…

Superintelligence The Idea That Eats Smart People In 1945, as American physicists were preparing to test the atomic bomb, it occurred to someone to ask if such a test could set the atmosphere on fire. This was a legitimate concern. Nitrogen, which makes up most of the atmosphere, is not…

Strategy is everywhere in our society. But strategy in practice seems to be a cruel and even silly joke. I learned that the hard way when I went to college long before I ever studied strategy formally. My own “strategy” about how to get through college collapsed virtually the moment I set foot on…

Please understand that I’m not making any kind of criticism of her when I say that JK Rowling has abandoned the real world. When you have one billion dollars, it’s not really something you need any more; there’s no real need to explain why she chooses to live with magic instead. If nothing else, she…

Pages 144-235 of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order Volume One: The Phenomenon of Life contain a theory of beauty as perceived by humans, conveyed in fifteen “fundamental properties.” Not every property occurs in every beautiful object, but in very beautiful buildings and objects, many of…

Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Author’s note: The thinking that gave rise to this essay was committed in collaboration with St. Rev . Errors, suspicious implications, and dubious conclusions are my own. On March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam, just north of Los Angeles,…

Warning: some of the haiku and tweets reproduced herein contain naughty language and references to having intimate relations with an inanimate national symbol. Is beauty subjective? People have strong feelings in both directions. A stylized representation of possible opinions about the nature of…

Spiritual experiences, listening to live music, taking LSD, the state of flow. Becoming absorbed in a story, spending time alone in nature, singing in a choir. Staring into a bonfire, dancing at a rave, falling in love, meditation. What do these things have in common? They are all experiences in…

"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his…

Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Nouns for human beings – “people” or “person” – conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of humans. Using nouns like “people” subtly encourages thinking about people as frozen in time, doing nothing in particular. “People” is an…

On May 28, Harambe, a 17-year-old lowland gorilla was shot and killed by a Cincinnati Zoo worker to save a small child who had wandered into its enclosure. As such tragic incidents go, there was nothing particularly unusual about this one. Just a week earlier on May 21, for instance, zookeepers at…

Back in 2010, deep green environmentalist Rick Smith, then head of Environmental Defence Canada, hailed Ontario’s Green Energy and Green Economy Act regime as a cost-free operation that would catapult the province into the big leagues of renewable energy. Through fat subsidies and high prices…

Benoit Tardif Midway through my opening address for the Brisbane Writers Festival earlier this month, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Australian engineer and 25-year-old memoirist, walked out. Her indignant comments about the event might have sunk into obscurity, along with my speech, had they…

lorelinde How discovering an equation for altruism cost George Price everything. Laura met George in the pages of Reader’s Digest . In just a couple of column inches, she read an abridged version of his biography and was instantly intrigued. In the 1960s, apparently, egotistical scientist George…

Theranos founder, chairwoman, and C.E.O. Elizabeth Holmes, in Palo Alto, California, September 2014. By Ethan Pines/The Forbes Collection. The War Room It was late morning on Friday, October 16, when Elizabeth Holmes realized that she had no other choice. She finally had to address heremployees at…

There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase. The meme goes something like this: Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions . They…

Happy Ambition: Striving for Success, Avoiding Status Cocaine, and Prioritizing Happiness Why do billionaires, CEOs, and other titans of industry work so hard? Why do they maintain such relentless professional ambition? Look up and down the Forbes 400 list and you’ll find hedge fund managers who…

A nother week, another Donald-being-Donald moment. For many years in baseball, Indians, Red Sox, and Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez became a running joke in the fan community. That wasn’t because he couldn’t hit — he was a tremendous hitter. It’s because Ramirez was a kook. He’d throw to the wrong…

History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump La Peste di Firenze It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re…

08.20. 2011 I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called…