Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
A Country Forgetting How to Have Friends In 1990, a Gallup survey asked Americans how many close friends they had. The modal answer was five to ten. In 2021, the Survey Center on American Life asked t...
Read article →An Environment Built Around a Vehicle The American suburb was not designed for human beings. It was designed for cars, and the distinction matters more than it might initially seem. From the mid-twent...
Read article →When the Mirror Shows a Stranger Most people take for granted a feeling so basic it rarely gets named: the sense that you are continuous with your own body, that the person looking back from the mirro...
Read article →Built for the Wrong Species There is a thought experiment worth sitting with. Take a creature that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in small, stable groups — groups where everyone knew your...
Read article →The Self You Left Behind Most people have experienced it: you find an old journal entry, a photograph from five years ago, a text message you sent to someone you no longer speak to, and you feel it —...
Read article →What Jung Actually Said The concept of the shadow has migrated so far from its origins that it is worth going back. Carl Jung used the term to describe the parts of the psyche that the conscious ego d...
Read article →The Scarcest Thing Before asking what social media has done to human connection, it is worth asking what connection actually requires. The answer, more than any other single factor, is attention. Not...
Read article →What the Sleeping Brain Is Actually Doing Dreams have attracted interpretation for as long as humans have recorded their inner lives. The ancient world treated them as messages from gods. Freud treate...
Read article →The Self That Changes With the Clock Most people have noticed it without fully naming it: you are not the same person at 3 AM that you were at 3 PM. The thoughts that come in the quiet darkness after...
Read article →What Small Towns Get Right The small town has a complicated reputation. Parochialism, gossip, limited opportunity, the suffocating weight of being known too well by people who have known you too long....
Read article →The Narrator You Never Chose There is a voice that runs almost continuously in most people's minds. It comments on events, rehearses future conversations, revisits past ones, issues verdicts on what j...
Read article →The Office That Never Made Sense The open office plan arrived in the 1990s with promises: collaboration would increase, hierarchies would flatten, creativity would flourish in the free flow of human c...
Read article →The Version You Keep Back Every person who has lived in more than one social world — which is most people, once you count family of origin, friend groups, professional contexts, and the self that appe...
Read article →The Ownership Problem The desire to have an original thought — to be the one who first sees something, who arrives at an insight uncontaminated by prior exposure — is a culturally specific form of anx...
Read article →The Thought That Watches Thoughts There is a moment most people have had but rarely examine: you catch yourself thinking something — a worry, a judgment, a memory — and then you notice that you caught...
Read article →Something Old About the Circle Every culture that has ever gathered around a fire has gathered in a circle. This is not coincidence or aesthetic preference. The circle is a social technology — one tha...
Read article →What Groups Actually Need There is a version of team-building advice that amounts to: hire good people, make sure they communicate, and trust the process. This is not wrong exactly, but it is incomple...
Read article →The Word That Does Too Much Work Gossip has a reputation problem. The word itself functions as a moral judgment — to gossip is to be small, petty, untrustworthy, the kind of person who whispers about...
Read article →When the Feeling Has a Name There is a specific experience that millions of people share and that language has only recently found useful words for: the sense of being present in multiple social world...
Read article →The Myth of the Self-Made Person The idea that the highest form of human achievement is the one accomplished alone is historically strange. It is also evolutionarily incoherent. For the vast majority...
Read article →The View From the Top There is a specific quality of silence that forms around people who hold authority. It is not a literal silence — the leader is usually in rooms full of conversation, receives mo...
Read article →The Number That Became a Rule Dunbar's Number — the claim that humans can maintain stable social relationships with approximately 150 people — has had an unusual career for a finding from anthropology...
Read article →The Homogeneous Group Problem There is a recurring fantasy in organizational design: assemble the most talented, highest-performing people in the room, and the results will be proportionally excellent...
Read article →The Threshold Guardian: That Voice in Your Head That Says You Are Not Ready In Campbell's mapping of the hero's journey, one of the most carefully described figures is the threshold guardian. This is...
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