“Fire, water, carbon, attention: these elements ask not to be maximized, but to be held in reciprocal maintenance.”
By Rimma Boshernitsan for @noemamag.com
A must read. The forefront.
www.noemamag.com/our-emerging...
Society has always had to deal with the problem of “low status men” who engage in reckless behavior to the detriment of the public. History can be viewed through a lens of how this problem gets solved (wars, marriage policies, gov labor programs).
This solution is not a very good one.
I’ll say it again: ICE agents are the least intelligent and least competent men in America. They are too stupid to work normal jobs, and they lack the executive function required to do anything else.
My critique: the essay reads like a proposed, centralized ethical framework for developing the new LLM ecosystems, however everything good in our world EMERGES. I would love to read a follow-up or related essay by someone detailing how the “mechanisms at play” might be cultivated from the soil.
“…sustaining the shared information commons”
Compelling essay by Hamilton Mann for @noemamag.com
www.noemamag.com/the-ai-power...
"In mathematical terms, the relationship is not linear — the first few minutes of patience bring the most gains, as they introduce enough slack in the system to match compatible routes and orders."
By Carlo Ratti for @financialtimes.com
www.ft.com/content/62fa...
“So, how far down the scale of complexity does cognition actually go?”
By Conor Feehly in @noemamag.com
www.noemamag.com/the-surprisi...
ICE agents are too unintelligent to hold normal jobs, so they take up this one.
Seriously, these are people with IQ’s around 70 or 80. They are too stupid to even know what they are doing. No employer in good standing wants them around and this is where they end up.
"Eventually, I stopped making resolutions altogether... The desire to work on myself never went away. It simply lost its appetite for spectacle. And so, in place of resolutions, I turned toward ritual."
Excellent short essay by Suleika Jaouad.
open.substack.com/pub/post/p/a...
I favor living in the world designed and built by those with creative agency.
And capitalists often view the same abstractions as inevitable in a competitive winner-take-all landscape, quipping that if growth is suppressed (laws, unions) the growth will take place elsewhere. In this view, the only styles of design are invention and capital allocation.
My own take…
Our social world is structured by abstractions that 1) provide real utility (eg trust, insurance, fungibility) 2) have real environmental impact (eg production, deforestation).
Bioregionalists view these abstractions as non-inevitable and potentially subject to a design process...
“A growing ecological movement sees the solution in bioregionalism: the idea of reorganizing social and economic life around the natural boundaries of the ecosystems that host and sustain us.”
By @dougbierend.bsky.social for @noemamag.com
www.noemamag.com/inside-the-p...
Autumn 2025. Village-to-village walks, lake views, risotto, vino, boulders.
We are always at square zero.
“But letting go and—crucially—reengaging with new goals, was found to restore purpose and well-being.”
Hugh Riddell, in a story by Molly Glick for @nautil.us
nautil.us/the-surprisi...
"The sun delivers more energy to Earth every five days than all known fossil fuel reserves combined. As we shift from using fossilised sunlight to real-time solar power, the challenge is no longer energy capture, but energy storage."
ember-energy.org/latest-insig...
That was an excellent read. “Sober,” you might call it, in its insistence on reasoned consideration of a complex problem.
Personal note: I’m into this new theme of essay: “humanist engineering” – in contrast to the “capitalist engineering” and “industrial engineering” that we are so familiar with.
Herzberg asks, “How does this system work?” “What are our effective levers?” “What has worked before?”
Pragmatic essay by drug historian David Herzberg for @nytimes.com (gift link below)
“Prohibition has actively made drugs more dangerous. This was not a grand drama of good and evil, but a predictable result of bad policy.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/o...
Minimal's upcoming release prominently features Apple Intelligence's Writing Tools. Preview the powerful new feature on our TestFlight and watch for Minimal 1.22 on the Mac App Store and iOS App Store 🖤
blog.minimal.app/ai-writing-t...
Absolute lunacy. The premise of any successful society is inclusion of the skillful.
Almost nothing else matters in comparison to that one attribute.
“The social function of criticism is too valuable to lose… the three-way relationship between artists, critics, and audiences must be carefully restored, if we want the 21st century to produce meaningful artistic innovations.”
Celine Nguyen, @asteriskmag.bsky.social
asteriskmag.com/issues/12-bo...
Are any economists stepping up and implementing the new analytical method for our changing world? I’d love to tune in.
This essay is a great first step, and as the author notes, “A new approach is needed.”
By @dianecoyle1859.bsky.social for @noemamag.com
www.noemamag.com/the-critical...
“We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe.“
Impeccable read by @henrywismayer.bsky.social featuring @lukekemp.bsky.social for @noemamag.com
www.noemamag.com/humanitys-en...
Do you suggest that the left is more comfortable with economic power being overturned, like a compost pile, producing yet more economic power?
Bullshit. The left literally invented marketplaces, impersonal trust (eg, signing contracts with strangers), accounting and financial mathematics, and modern legal system.
One room, one book.
Marioka Shoten is a bookstore in Tokyo.
www.takram.com/projects/a-s...
“There is likely to be one pileup of civilizations that don’t last very long — those that were “too dumb” — and a second pileup of civilizations that somehow figured it out, so to speak.”
