Wipe the Slate Clean: The Debt Written in Chalk
A poetic dive into “wipe the slate clean” — a phrase from the tavern wall, where your debts were written in chalk precisely because chalk can be erased.
The Floor Decides the Ceiling: The Psychology of Foundational Learning
Why chess masters forget random boards, why rereading lies to you, and how the first things you learn quietly set the limit on everything after. Advanced English, built together.
Universal High Income Sounds Wonderful Until You Ask Who Signs the Check
Elon Musk says AI and robots will make work optional within ten to twenty years, funded by government-issued “universal high income.” The promise is sincere. The arithmetic is plausible. The politics are a catastrophe — and for most of the world, the offer isn’t even on the table. An examination of what happens to human dignity, political leverage, and global hope when your livelihood becomes a transfer instead of a claim.
The Ethnic Aisle: Why We Flatten Other People’s Cultures — and Refuse to Let Anyone Flatten Ours
We compress distant cultures into one word and bristle when anyone does it to us. A look at resolution asymmetry — why it happens, when it’s harmless, and when it isn’t.
The Luddites Weren’t Afraid of Technology: What a 200-Year-Old Rebellion Reveals About Our Panic Over AI
We use “Luddite” to mean technophobe. The real Luddites were skilled workers fighting over who controls technology and who profits from it — the exact fight we’re having about AI right now.
Who Gets to Be Called a Luddite? The History We Got Backwards
The Luddites are history’s favorite punchline for anyone who fears progress. But they never opposed machines — and the people who actually killed good technology were rarely holding a hammer. A deep dive into the smearing of a movement and the far quieter sabotage that followed.
The AI Slop Panic Is Hiding Something: We Already Let Machines Choose What We Consume
We recoil at AI-generated content while happily consuming whatever an algorithm serves us. This deep dive examines the hypocrisy in our performed disgust, why “human or machine?” is the wrong question, and what a more honest relationship with content actually looks like.
The Boring People Built Everything: Why We Stopped Celebrating Scientists, Poets, and Teachers
Scientists, poets, and teachers were once public heroes. Now they’re invisible. A deep dive into what actually changed — and what to honestly tell a young person.
The Brand Called You: When Who You Are Started Beating What You Do
There was a moment when who you are started mattering more than how good you are. Here’s what changed, what we gained, and the quiet bill now coming due.
The Superstar Machine: How Fame Really Gets Made (It’s Not Luck, and It’s Not a Conspiracy)
Fame isn’t random luck or a shadowy conspiracy — it’s a business model. A deep dive into superstar economics, the algorithm, and the dopamine lottery that keeps us all playing.
Do I Have to Be a Full-Time Writer to Call Myself a Writer?
You don’t need to quit everything to be a writer. A warm, dryly funny journal entry on the day job, the starving artist myth, and why “give up all else” is the worst advice in the arts.
A History of Sex as a Business 10 | Where Do We Go From Here: Laws, Justice, and Human Dignity
Five thousand years of history bring us to the hardest questions: what policies actually protect people, what evidence says about different approaches, and what it would mean to organize our response to commercial sex around the genuine interests of the most vulnerable people involved.
