1. The backrooms with their yellowing wallpaper and flickering lights are half place half feeling, a sense of the nauseatingly infinite made visible. We get lost in similar places — digital worlds, bureaucratic institutions, our heads — and though we may feel the emptiness of doing so, we may, like deranged zoo
1. “A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?” 2. Someone once asked me: are you afraid of success? I thought it was
1. A meme from a few years back has a distressed econ scholar telling the Fed chairman why we can’t just print money to fix an economic downturn. Haha money printer go brrr, he replies. 2. People talking is a good thing. Under most conditions, it means people'
Gloomberg Tech What's next for Sunspot? Sources say WiFi, photos May 1st, 2028 Where were you when you first heard "the Song"? Thankfully, not everyone remembers, thanks to what's now a household name: Sunspot. For those who kept the memories, the weeks afterward were
1. Say you're an orb floating in space: a being of pure agency, freedom, choice. You can go wherever and manipulate matter. Your judgment gets no nudges from things like hunger or cultural norms. You don't have the baggage – the human past, the emotional machinery – of
1. It varies in close relationships; beyond those, we expect too little from each other. We live in an art show where most of us pace around, looking at stuff. It may affect us; we may cry or rejoice; but much of it is so brutal and grotesque that it
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The boy squeezes his eyes closed. He opens them again, blinking, as if to wake himself up. Same popcorn ceiling, same wood-paneled walls. Same musty odor laced with perfume. The room is too cold and too hot. "Brothers and sisters, before I go ahead," the judge drawls, shuffling
1. I beat the cold by staying in. I watch movies I haven’t seen. Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Aftersun. I have one more beer than planned. Though getting longer, the days are becoming night more quickly. “Anxiety is the only emotion that doesn’t deceive,” say some
If the camera picked up the fingers typing it, the model got it. PINs and passwords, account and routing numbers. He would sometimes bug the lampposts near DMVs and embassies. It was like going after whales instead of fish, not as productive as ATMs but sometimes delivering social security numbers,
Hey all. This is the first post sent via Ghost. If you unsubscribed through Substack and you're getting this in error, there's an unsubscribe link down at the bottom. To everyone else, thanks for being here. Happy holidays. 1. “The day you learn that life isn’
On knowing where you get them 1. My favorite thing was acing tests. To my slow and painful surprise life turned out not to be about the 100 in red ink but everything before it. The usefulness and enjoyment of the skill; an understanding of the rules that lets you
The story that definitely kind of happened 1. Here’s what I was told: five monkeys are in a room with a ladder. Suspended over the ladder is a banana. Any monkey who tries to touch it gets shocked. They all quickly learn to not touch it. One by one,