The Ken Burns Effect

https://mattlira.substack.com/p/the-ken-burns-effect

Millions of Americans now inhabit information ecosystems that barely overlap. Most public figures avoid crossing these boundaries; some out of fear of unfriendly audiences, others because they worry that stepping outside their own silo will provoke a backlash from their closest allies. Burns’ latest tour defies that trend, as one of our nation’s great storytellers has moved effortlessly from The Today Show to Theo Von’s podcast, from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to Joe Rogan’s studio. What stands out is not merely the breadth of platforms he visits, striking as that is, but the authenticity with which he delivers his message. Burns shares the American story with a consistent sense of moral seriousness and intellectual credibility without condescension or pandering, addressing the best versions of his hosts and their audiences.

Mercy Otis Warren: "Look Over the Theatre of Human Action"

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/mercy-otis-warren-look-over-theatre-human-action

The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of man, that pants for distinction. This principle operates in every bosom, and when kept under the control of reason, and the influence of humanity, it produces the most benevolent effects. But when the checks of conscious are thrown aside, or the moral sense weakened by the sudden acquisition of wealth or power, humanity is obscured

How to be more agentic

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic

Learn to love the moat of low status

The moat of low status is one of my favorite concepts, courtesy of my husband Sasha. The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because it gives anyone who can cross it a real advantage. It’s possible to cross the moat quietly, by not asking questions and not collaborating, but those tradeoffs really nerf learning. “Learn by doing” is standard advice, but you can’t do that unless you splash around in the moat for a bit.

Maybe you’re not Actually Trying

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/maybe-youre-not-actually-trying

People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.

Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.

In my particular corner of the world, there are tons of high-achievers in work. These are ingenious people shaping the world through innovations in science, technology, and policy. But many of them haven’t applied the same ingenuity to their interior experience or relationships. These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps.

It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.

Your enemies might be right about you

https://sahar.substack.com/p/your-enemies-might-be-right-about

If your enemies are attacking you and winning, there’s a good chance it’s because you have a real weakness.

It’s not that they’ll be nice enough to attack your weakness with compassion: they’ll twist truth and be as unscrupulous as they can get away with. It’s not that they’ll only attack you for things you’re actually wrong about: maybe you are weak because you’re correct but unpopular. But it still is a real weakness. Either way — you have a problem.

Even if it’s all horribly unfair — understanding where people don’t trust you, where they don’t like you, where you’re misunderstood, where people are liable to scandalous lies about you — that’s information. Useful information.

When we’re fully enmeshed in a social scene, we keep track of who is important, and who is an annoying barely tolerated crank. We forget that others looking in have neither the context nor desire to make that distinction. The worst members of your team often become its public face: the edgelords, the conspiracists, the assholes, the scolds, the predators, and worse. You know who will make sure to show you when that happens? Even when it hurts your feelings — especially if it hurts your feelings? Enemies. God bless them. 

The Deadliness of Good Intentions

https://www.1517.org/articles/the-deadliness-of-good-intentions

Therapists spend hours, if not years, trying to explain to people that intent does not equal impact. For example, you may not have intended to hurt your kids, but the fact of the matter is, you hurt your kids. You can’t tell your kids “stop acting hurt because I intended to do good—it just went wrong.” Therapists try to bring patients from the reality of “it went wrong” to “it needs to be made right.”

We try to justify ourselves through the means of the ever-virtuous “intent.” Intent is the mind’s way of searching for some redemption, or some justification. Intent is often a liar. It covers the sins of pride and entitlement. 

When we take a harder look at intent, we’ll find the “lesser sins” that we find tolerable, if not necessary sometimes to get the desired outcome that we’d prefer. For example, we had to lie, because otherwise they wouldn’t do what we needed them to do for a good thing to happen. Or, we were only making a prayer request, not gossiping. Any time we bend the law to fit our need for a “good thing,” we are attempting to do, we’ll find calculated manipulation, or the thoughtful way we hide what our actions so as to not upset anyone.

I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/fear-laughing-riyadh-comedy-louis-ck/684527/?gift=SKtFP-7gCBnFn1bNJdqPMi_7j1-Q3xFUfh3oXFEbWpw

As I ate dinner one night at the Ritz-Carlton, in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the indoor swimming pool, I reflected that the promise of a five-star hotel is insulation, a cocoon against the outside world. A rich person—a successful comedian, say—could glide from the business-class lounge to the front of the aircraft to an air-conditioned limo to a luxury hotel where your dinner is interrupted by five different people asking if everything is okay. Live enough days like this, and the whole world becomes your bellhop. No wonder these guys like Saudi Arabia. The way that daily life bends around rich people is that little bit more obvious here.

The Agentic State Vision Paper

https://agenticstate.org/paper.html

AI technologies have matured sufficiently to handle real-world government complexity whilst costs have decreased enough to enable widespread deployment. Citizens increasingly expect digital service experiences comparable to those they receive from leading private sector organisations, creating public demand for agentic government services. Perhaps most importantly, governments that act now can actively shape the development trajectory of agentic AI to serve public purposes rather than merely adapting to systems designed by others according to commercial priorities.

Seven Charts That Explain the Past 25 Years of the NBA

https://www.theringer.com/2025/10/10/nba/seven-charts-that-explain-the-21st-century-nba

It’s hard to overstate just how much pro basketball has mutated since Y2K. The 2000s NBA was an analog league full of hulking centers, midrange jumpers, and pixelated national TV games framed in 4:3. But the game has since changed in every imaginable way: stylistically, financially, globally, and culturally. We’ve witnessed the rise of the 3-pointer, the death of the post-up, the internationalization of the MVP race, and the billionaire-ification of the NBA’s ownership class and even of some players. 

As part of its weeklong reflection on the NBA quarter century, The Ringer asked me to come up with a set of charts that explain the past 25 years of the best basketball league in the world. Let’s start with shooting.

Algorithms are breaking how we think

US gov't admits F-35 is a failure

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/f-35-failure/

Nearly a quarter century after the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to develop the Joint Strike Fighter Program into the F-35, the government finally admitted the jet will never live up to Lockheed’s ambitious promises — used to sell the $2 trillion boondoggle to nearly 20 countries around the world.

The Government Accountability Office released a report last month detailing the ongoing challenges the program faces. The first paragraph of the highlights page includes this sentence:

“The program plans to reduce the scope of Block 4 to deliver capabilities to the warfighter at a more predictable pace than in the past.”

The casual reader will be forgiven for possibly glossing over the passage because of its anodyne wording. But the statement is a profound admission that the F-35 will never meet the capability goals set for the program. “Reduce the scope of Block 4” means that program officials are forgoing planned combat capabilities for the jets.

Block 4 is the term to describe ongoing design work for the program. It began in 2019 and was termed as the program’s “modernization” phase. In reality, Block 4 is just a continuation of the program’s initial development process. Officials were unable to complete the F-35’s basic design within the program’s initial budget and schedule. Rather than making that embarrassing admission and requesting more time and money from Congress, Pentagon officials claimed the initial development process was complete (it was not) and they were moving on to “modernization.” What they really did was simply reclassify initial development work with a fancy rebrand.

So, when program officials say they plan to “reduce the scope of Block 4,” they are saying the F-35 will not have all the combat capabilities that were supposed to be a part of the original design.

This is a remarkable development

The dawn of the post-literate society

https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

Power, Money, and Booze - A Leaders Perspective on Preventing Sexual Assault

https://mkloepper2025.substack.com/p/power-money-and-booze-a-leaders-perspective

As you can imagine, the regional AAFES manager was not super happy about our request that he reduce shelf space dedicated to hard alcohol. Afterall, AAFES operates for profit. It’s a unique organization that provides service members with good retail services and circulates a portion of their proceeds into various morale programs. And, they operate for profit. And, booze makes money (as does tobacco and junk food). 

 In any event, despite his misgivings, when presented with our data, our regional AAFES manager had little choice…he reduced the linear shelf space of hard alcohol and limited container sizes to .75 liters. (Math is interesting…in one meeting the manager revealed his quarterly profits from hard alcohol. It was a lot. We did some quick napkin math and showed him the profit value to AAFES for each sexual assault in my Brigade. It was sickening, and inarguable).

I Printed a Microchip That Runs on Air — A Nervous System for Squishy Robots!

Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-economy-middle-class-rich.html

For most of the park’s history, Disney was priced to welcome people across the income spectrum, embracing the motto “Everyone is a V.I.P.” In doing so, it created a shared American culture by providing the same experience to every guest. The family that pulled up in a new Cadillac stood in the same lines, ate the same food and rode the same rides as the family that arrived in a used Chevy. Back then, America’s large and thriving middle class was the focus of most companies’ efforts and firmly in the driver’s seat.

That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.

Data is part of what’s driving this shift. The rise of the internet, the algorithm, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence are giving corporations the tools to target the fast-growing masses of high-net-worth Americans with increasing ease. As a management consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies making this very transition. Many of our biggest private institutions are now focused on selling the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up — or fight to keep up.

Slow social media

https://herman.bearblog.dev/slow-social-media/

However, the underlying concept of social media is something I resonate with: Stay connected with the people you care about.

It's just that the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce.

Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.

I don't think most people using these platforms understand that they are the product. Instagram isn't built for you. It's built for marketers. It's built for celebrities to capitalise on their audiences. It's built for politicians and their cronies to sway sentiment. It's built to be as addictive as possible, and to capitalise on your insecurity and uncomfortability. 

DC Track Maps

https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/docs/DC_TrackMap.pdf?_t=1716910953

https://ggwash.org/images/posts/201309-091115.gif

Wheel of Emotions

https://mentallyagile.com/blog/2020/3/24/wheel-of-emotions

There are many emotion wheels out there, but they all center around six primary emotions:

• Fear

• Anger

• Sadness

• Love

• Joy

• Surprise

One might feel love, and that is a permissible answer, but one could also feel something more specific in that emotion. A conversation with a trusted friend might have someone feeling compassionate or peaceful. The point was to zero in on how we were feeling and give a true answer

Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-economy-middle-class-rich.html

For most of the park’s history, Disney was priced to welcome people across the income spectrum, embracing the motto “Everyone is a V.I.P.” In doing so, it created a shared American culture by providing the same experience to every guest. The family that pulled up in a new Cadillac stood in the same lines, ate the same food and rode the same rides as the family that arrived in a used Chevy. Back then, America’s large and thriving middle class was the focus of most companies’ efforts and firmly in the driver’s seat.

That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.

Data is part of what’s driving this shift. The rise of the internet, the algorithm, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence are giving corporations the tools to target the fast-growing masses of high-net-worth Americans with increasing ease. As a management consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies making this very transition. Many of our biggest private institutions are now focused on selling the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up — or fight to keep up.

Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/why-good-ideas-die-quietly-and-bad-ideas-go-viral

The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data. Vast triage structures evolved to determine who got to learn what, when: medieval guilds, say, or network news reports. These systems were supposed to function in everybody’s best interests. We were finite brutes of fragile competence, and none of us could confront the abyss of unmitigated complexity alone. Beyond a certain point, however, we couldn’t help but perceive these increasingly centralized arrangements as insulting, and even conspiratorial. We were grownups, and, as such, we could be trusted to handle an unadulterated marketplace of ideas. The logic of the internet was simple: first, fire all of the managers; then, sort things out for ourselves. In the time since, one of the few unambiguously good things to have emerged from this experiment is an entire genre of attempts to explain why it mostly hasn’t worked out.