coming soon to a bookshelf near you I wrote a book! It’s called The Strangest Idea in the World and you can get it here and looks like this: If you’re in the UK, you can get it here and it looks like this 1 : A few years ago, I got obsessed with a question: why did it take humans 300,000 years to invent the toilet? By which I mean, why did it take so long to discover and invent everything that we’

OR: hey buddy, your teeth are falling out photo cred: my dad We’re living through an epidemic of loneliness and everybody knows it, except for one small group: people who have actually looked at the data. Much of what appears to be a loneliness epidemic is, in fact, a well-intentioned misunderstanding. However, there is a real epidemic out there—one that is far stranger and more sinister. I’ll get

don’t tell someone they look like Beaker from The Muppets, etc. photo cred: my dad Most advice is bad. It’s either obvious (“Don’t sweat the small stuff”—if I thought it was small, I wouldn’t be sweating it!), applicable to some people but not to others (“Be more aggressive”—some people should, sure, but other people need to cool it), or wrong (“Live every day as if it was your last”—so I should s

OR: an apology to my English teachers photo cred: my dad I owe an apology to every English teacher I ever had. I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being young. These books did not have anything special about them, and covering up that fact was simply a make-work exercise for former English majors, a sort of “jobs f

OR: you must look at this fish and go insane photo cred: my dad We can all agree: the incentives are bad. Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing. This has become the go-to diagnosis for every problem, from climate change to political polarization to scientific malfeasance—“sorry pal, you’ve got a bad case of the incentives.” I don’t disagree with this analysis, ex

photo cred: my dad This is the third annual Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree, where people send me their best new blog posts and I reward my favorites with praise and cash. This year, I got 68 submissions from folks all over the world, including visual artists, consultants, high schoolers, economists, engineers, lawyers, and all sorts of pseudonymous internet

2 Decline, 2 Deviance photo cred: my dad In The Decline of Deviance , I argued that: Many forms of risk-taking and rule-breaking have declined since the 1990s. This is both good (less crime) and bad (less innovation). Deviance is declining because prosperity has increased—people have more to lose, and they’re acting like it. Since I put it out last October, this has become my most-read post of all

photo cred: my dad This is the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a collection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months. (1) THE MOST WONDERFUL THING THAT HAPPENED TO TOMMY MCHUGH A British man named Tommy McHugh was on the toilet pooping when apparently he strained too hard, had a stroke, and woke up in the hospital. McHugh was construction worker and ex-con who had never been

OR: The Great Switcheroo photo cred: my dad Here’s a story from 30 years ago that would make no sense today. It’s 1992. Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten is selling well. But then MTV puts the music video for their song “Jeremy” in heavy rotation, and the band rockets into superstardom—shows suddenly sold out, fans smashing record store windows, the whole shebang. That’s familiar enough, but what happen

OR: hit me with your Honda photo cred: my dad There’s a guy who sends me a nasty reply to every one of my posts. Within 24 hours of an email going out, he arrives in my inbox like: you had me at “has the capability to articulate thoughts well” 😍😍😍😍😍😍 Read more

OR: crock pots and lightning bolts photo cred: my dad 1. Say what you will about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its 1936 constitution was a banger. It guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and protest. It extended equal rights to all citizens, regardless of race or gender. It shortened the working day to seven hours, affirmed “the right to rest and leisure”, and offered free

photo cred: my dad It’s time for the annual Experimental History Blog Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree! Send me your best unpublished blog post, and if I pick yours, I’ll send you real cash money and tell everybody how great you are. You can see last year’s winners and honorable mentions here . They included: a self-experiment on lactose intolerance, a story about working as a 10-year-old b

OR: the Halo theory of science photo cred: my dad Here’s a reasonable thought: as the replication crisis has unfolded over the past 10-15 years, a bunch of psychological phenomena have been debunked and discarded forever. Power posing , ego depletion , growth mindset , stereotype threat , walking slower after reading the word “Florida” —all gone for good. Surely, nobody studies or publishes on the

OR: if we were playing by Settlers of Catan rules, I'd be dead already photo cred: my dad The better AI has gotten, the less anxious I’ve become. A few years ago, when the computers first started talking, it was reasonable to believe that we would soon be in the presence of omnipotent machines. For someone like me, whose job is to produce words on the internet, it seemed like only a matter of time

OR: rubberneckers anonymous photo cred: my dad If they labeled it explicitly, one of the biggest categories on Substack would be called something like, “People Pretending to Be Persecuted”. Browse any genre and you’ll find writers touting their exile from polite society with titles like “DR. BOB’S POLITICALLY INCORRECT HOEDOWN” and “The Cancelled Gardener”. I know people have been c… Read more

OR: the long overdue forest fire photo cred: my dad If you ever want a good laugh, ask an academic to explain what they get paid to do, and who pays them to do it. In STEM fields, it works like this: the university pays you to teach, but unless you’re at a liberal arts college, you don’t actually get promoted or recognized for your teaching. Instead, you get promoted and recognized for your resear

photo cred: my dad This is the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a selection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months. First up, a series of unfortunate events in science: (1) WHEN WHEN PROPHECY FAILS FAILS When Prophecy Fails is supposed to be a classic case study of cognitive dissonance: a UFO cult predicts an apocalypse, and when the world doesn’t end, they double down and

OR: why you should sell onions on the internet photo cred: my dad Underrated Ways to Change the World is one of my most-read posts of all time, I think because people see the state of the world and they’re like, “Oh no, someone should do something about this!” and then they’re like “But what should I do about this?” Every problem seems so impossibly large and complicated, where do you even start?

11 notes on turning unknowns into knowns photo cred: my dad 1. A few months ago, I got to interview a bunch of bloggers at a writing retreat. I discovered that they all had one thing in common: each one was in possession of a secret. I don’t mean that they, like, murdered their boyfriend and got away with it, or that they’re sexually attracted to mollusks. I mean that they had all tapped some ve…

read on, queen photo cred: my dad The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myt