Short Version/TLDR Social media is becoming increasingly passive, much like TV. Rather than socializing or communicating, we’re being led to simply watch, consume, and follow. This has been a gradual process we can trace since the earliest days of social media. And it threatens to continue into future models of the internet…

Book Review: Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self recounts the history of the “Jena Circle,” a group of highly influential German writers, poets, and philosophers who were instrumental in birthing the Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th…

Teal Swan is a popular but controversial spiritual teacher, author, and YouTuber whose channel has over a million subscribers. The Deep End, directed by Jon Kasbe, is a documentary streaming on Hulu, that takes a close but extremely critical look at Teal Swan and her organization. While she has attracted…

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, by Michael Easter I suppose it’s inevitable that a society preoccupied with comfort and technology would provoke a backlash. It’s hard to argue with the basic premise of The Comfort Crisis. There’s little doubt that a mostly sedentary…

“I know that I know nothing.” -Socrates “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki In the Major Arcana of the Tarot, The Fool has the number (or non-number) 0. …

How rating and reviewing everything changes the way we live, work, shop, and feel about each other. The popular UK TV series Black Mirror satirizes the world’s obsession with ratings and reviews in the episode entitled Nosedive, in which people rate each other after every interaction. People whose ratings drop…

“Nothing exists except an endless Present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell, 1984 Everyone is obsessed with time: an employees waking up to alarm clocks, quantum physicists, philosophers, and mystics. Time management experts teach us to get more done in less time. …