How to make a great playlist

Thanks to Spotify, the playlist has become the most important organizing device for music. The function that used to be done by albums and radio DJs — namely, grouping songs together — now happens in the playlists we build for ourselves.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end

“In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort…

Prelude

I’m trying something different this year. I’m one of those people who wants to be a writer but rarely actually writes. So for the last few years, one of my New Year’s Resolutions has been to fix that. Each time, I imagine writing beautiful, long-form essays on complex topics. They’d be rigorous and well-crafted…

Confirmation Hearings are Broken

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, sat for her Senate confirmation hearing today. I know little of the nominee, other than the two labels she’s been given most frequently: billionaire and school choice advocate. Those descriptors alone would make…

How We Use Names

Dictionaries are collections of names. They collect the names of all the things we do and say to define them and standardize…

Our Outrage Bubbles

What breaks my heart about last year is how our political conversation has frayed and fractured. The currency of our national debate is now outrage. The more angry someone is and the louder their outrage, the more they are heard and the more social and political capital they accumulate. How…

Super-intelligent-existential-morality

Will superintelligent machines destroy humanity? Or will they suffer a super-existential meltdown? Or will they develop their own super-moral system that tends towards goodness?

2017

I wish there was a treaty we could sign.

It’s over now, the water and the wine.

We were broken then, now we’re borderline.

I wish there was a treaty, I…

Automation and a Jobless Future

The greatest threat to American jobs in this decade isn’t foreign competition. Although companies shipping jobs to Mexico or China make an easy target for the Trumps and Sanders of the world, the real threat is automation.