Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison have banded together to fund small ventures for new aesthetics. "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, what should the future actually look like?"
It's a great question and one that will be explored by many. Their method of applying small (capital s small) capital to individual creators is something that should be replicated by the new class of millionaires and billionaires being minted in the valley. I think it is important to establish the social norm among the ultra wealthy of giving money to create beautiful spaces open to the public. The Sn Francisco Baths, the Smithsonians, the Chicago Art Institute. All examples of spaces for the public good funded in part or wholly by the wealthy.
Ben Sasse is deliberately dying in public. He has elected to use this time to speak on the concept of America and the American people. He forecasts a beautiful and terrible world where we have limitless opportunity, enabled by technology but great risk, enabled by technology. He talks more than anything about the fundamentals of what it means to be a person and explores the concepts that are have been seeping through writing for almost a decade now: how to return to thick places, how to be present and avoid the soul-reducing pull of social media. More than that, he focuses on the family unit (without defining it from a gender perspective) as a true marvel in the world and one that should be valued and reinforced.
I can't recommend this enough.
John Gardner gave a talk to McKinsey partners in the early 1990's and more or less leans into the idea that the journey is the destination. Some particularly well written quotes below.
"We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.” I could without any trouble name a half of a dozen national figures resident in Washington, D.C., whom you would recognize, and could tell you roughly the year their clock stopped. I won’t do it because I still have to deal with them periodically."
"One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we’ve piled up enough points to count ourselves successful.
So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty.
You wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain.
But life isn’t a mountain that has a summit, Nor is it — as some suppose — a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.
Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves."
Older Interview with a fantastic writer, GLK, about his experience over 3 pilgramages, starting with the El Camino. His father, a Rabbi, came out in his 50's when Gideon and his brother were teens. It completely upturned the family dynamic and GLK wrestled with that immensely (I would to) between wanting someone to be true to themselves while living with the realities of what that means when you are the one they are abandoning. Great quote about quests below.
"There’s a real problem with the quest narrative. That concept gets complicated and undermined throughout the course of the book. Either you’re going to give a narratively satisfying climax, which is the person getting to the end of the Camino and being reborn. But that’s total bullshit emotionally. As much as every reader wants to believe that you get to Santiago and you’ve been reborn, we know it’s not what happens. But on the other hand if you write that you got to Santiago and all you did was stop walking, which is basically what happens, then that’s narratively unsatisfying. I wanted to think about what the experience meant. That’s why it’s important that it took me a couple of years to write this book because I had to deal with how it was all playing out in my life over time."
Great quote: The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
Long list of great articles, videos, and books that hold true through slopification.
N+1 (surprisingly) writes a solid analysis of Sinner’s tennis style. While harsh, I agree that Sinner is mechanically efficient in his playing style which in some ways makes it all the more brutal.
Newsletters have to be specific and preferably thematic. Posting your diary entries may generate attention but doesn't reflect effort that a great newsletter brings to the table (or your inbox).
I like this artist, a bit refined but interesting perspective that modern art served a purpose for a cultural moment before needing to shift.
Good little list of book recs about writing!
Great quote - “Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it's not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's going to be a weird, bad world.”
Fundamentally, a brand is built around a product, and a product should be built to solve a problem.
A good reminder about navigating life (a classic graduation speech)
An argument for why to write in Chicago.
Note: I like this for the simple fact that it makes a worthwhile argument about a fantastic city.
Writer and photographer. Beautiful long-form essays on walking, books, and Japan.
Author and media inventor. Great model for personal site structure.
Fantastic article that pins down what is wrong in Silicon Valley and how the culture is so flawed.
Full elements of style (PDF) - writing guide from William Strunk and E.B. White
Letter from April 1958 on finding purpose and meaning.
Writing on AI and 2026 AI predictions
A list of books and articles detailing how to define progress (as in cultural and scientific advancements) that we should be thinking about.
Just a great article that covers everything from con men to movie producers. It's a long article but reads quickly.
A long but really insightful article into how intel operations are conducted, some of the cultural pieces of intel gathering, Iran, and how ops officers try to make money after they leave.
Shishkin’s formulation is elegant: story first, user need second, format third. The live blog, on the other hand, is less refined and only gives the sensation of being informed rather than the development of understanding.