Matthew Reed, just checkin'
via:
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Speed Negotiations
[ed. Funny. Never seen this clip before (NewsRadio). Finding the right one takes time (the wrong one, not so much).]
CEO Dinner Insights: November 2025
I am still buzzing from our last Wildfire post. With so many new subscribers, I thought it helpful to provide context. The CEO Dinner is a monthly gathering of leading Silicon Valley CEOs. We’ve been meeting for 16 years to exchange entrepreneurial experiences, discuss technology trends and support each other professionally and personally. Each CEO takes a turn hosting, inviting guests and often posing a Jeffersonian question for us to answer.
Our discussion follows Chatham House rules, allowing us to share what was discussed while keeping speaker identities confidential. The combination of 1) an abundance mindset to share these discussions and 2) a new phase of empty nesting where I have more time yielded The CEO Dinner substack. It’s thrilling to see the response. You can look forward to regular insights from our dinners as well as special pieces we’ve considered for years. With a meaningful audience, 2026 will be the right year to begin sharing more resources and frameworks with aspiring entrepreneurs! (...)
The table at the end of the report captures the full range of positions discussed. It’s important to note that most of these are individual opinions, not group consensus. The results revealed wide ranging commentary: Waymo was a favorite long, appearing multiple times. Perplexity was the biggest short, with multiple attendees citing distribution challenges and ethical concerns. In the model wars, Google’s timely Gemini 3 release indicates they’re heading in the right direction with model quality joining their other formidable hyperscaler assets. Positive sentiment around Anthropic was equally matched by concern for Meta. OpenAI is still king but sits under the Sword of Damocles.
Outside AI darlings, Apple is ready to pop once they have something worth popping about. Netflix got shade for being a pick ‘em, not platform, story. Microsoft is well-positioned for the AI wildfire aftermath. Robinhood is ready to steal from Coinbase and give better experiences to their customers. Disrupting innovation still abounds at every level, especially with startups, and BigTech will need to stay on their toes with acquisitions being critical to stay relevant.
More broadly, we discussed how labor economics have as much focus today as during the Industrial Revolution - - virtual machines squeezing out human costs while improving quality. (Note: I’ve always enjoyed em dashes and am reclaiming them with the traditional typewriter solution, two hyphens.) (...)
Waymo is Driving Away with Autonomous Transportation
A strong consensus long position emerged immediately: Waymo’s product superiority combines with devastating unit economics to create an unassailable moat. At $21 for rides that cost $105 in Uber Black, Waymo demonstrates 75-80% cost reduction by eliminating labor. Leaders who’ve experienced the product universally prefer it to human drivers, citing safety, consistency, and price. The training data advantage (millions of miles weekly) creates a flywheel competitors cannot match. Tesla’s full self-driving lags significantly (2x the accident rate in Austin), and the training data narrative is false. Tesla sends back only intervention data, not general mileage. Uber and Lyft face existential threat.
“The most shocking thing about Waymo isn’t that it drives itself. It’s the price. A 20-minute ride from the wharf to the Four Seasons that would have been $105 in Uber Black cost me just $21.” (...)
The Legal Tech Disruption Finally Arrives
Leaders identified a major shift in legal services: companies providing outcome-based pricing by owning law firms and powering them with AI platforms. Rather than helping law firms become more efficient (which creates perverse incentives against adoption), these platforms acquire 300-person firms, empower attorneys with AI tools, and offer flat-fee pricing to Fortune 500 companies, promising 90% cost reductions. The billable hour model prevents traditional law firms from capturing AI productivity gains, creating vulnerability to disruptors who align incentives properly.
“Traditional law firms are facing a conundrum. Why do you want to be 300% more efficient? Now you have to bill 3 times as many hours. AI-Native law firms like Eudia are killing the billable hour.”
Strategic Themes
Theme 1: The Labor Cost Revolution Creates Winner-Take-All Dynamics
The Problem: Labor represents 75-80% of costs in most service businesses, and AI’s ability to eliminate those costs is creating unprecedented pricing power for early adopters.
Waymo’s pricing advantage illustrates the magnitude of disruption. A $21 ride replacing a $105 Uber Black ride represents an 80% cost reduction, precisely the labor component eliminated by autonomy. We’re seeing order-of-magnitude transformation here. One leader observed: “75 to 80% of every business is labor. All these things are coming and taking labor out. Everything’s going to start just collapsing.”
The implications extend beyond transportation. Zipline’s drone delivery captures 3% of DoorDash’s business in Dallas alone by eliminating driver labor. Sierra and similar enterprise AI companies provide “shovel ready” customer service automation that companies can deploy immediately. Legal tech platforms cut costs 90% by eliminating attorney time on routine work.
First movers in labor automation can underprice incumbents so dramatically that competitive response becomes impossible. Uber cannot match Waymo’s $21 price point with human drivers. DoorDash cannot compete with drone delivery’s 15-minute coffee delivery economics. The winner-take-all dynamic isn’t about slightly better products but about fundamentally different cost structures.
The Insight: Labor cost elimination creates moats so deep that late followers cannot compete on price, quality, or experience simultaneously. The first company to achieve reliable automation in a category can price at levels that make the entire existing industry unprofitable while still maintaining healthy margins.
Leadership Implication: Identify your labor-intensive processes and attack them with extreme urgency. The first mover advantage in labor automation is more durable than typical technology advantages because it’s structural, not feature-based. Once a competitor eliminates 75% of costs, you cannot gradually catch up. You must completely rebuild your business model. In categories where automation is viable, assume you have 12-18 months before a competitor makes your entire cost structure obsolete.
[ed. See also: The AI Wildfire Is Coming. It's Going to Be Very Painful and Incredibly Healthy. (CEO).]
Our discussion follows Chatham House rules, allowing us to share what was discussed while keeping speaker identities confidential. The combination of 1) an abundance mindset to share these discussions and 2) a new phase of empty nesting where I have more time yielded The CEO Dinner substack. It’s thrilling to see the response. You can look forward to regular insights from our dinners as well as special pieces we’ve considered for years. With a meaningful audience, 2026 will be the right year to begin sharing more resources and frameworks with aspiring entrepreneurs! (...)
Outside AI darlings, Apple is ready to pop once they have something worth popping about. Netflix got shade for being a pick ‘em, not platform, story. Microsoft is well-positioned for the AI wildfire aftermath. Robinhood is ready to steal from Coinbase and give better experiences to their customers. Disrupting innovation still abounds at every level, especially with startups, and BigTech will need to stay on their toes with acquisitions being critical to stay relevant.
More broadly, we discussed how labor economics have as much focus today as during the Industrial Revolution - - virtual machines squeezing out human costs while improving quality. (Note: I’ve always enjoyed em dashes and am reclaiming them with the traditional typewriter solution, two hyphens.) (...)
Executive Summary
Eighteen technology leaders gathered for a long/short stock game that revealed five critical insights about market positioning and competitive strategy:
Eighteen technology leaders gathered for a long/short stock game that revealed five critical insights about market positioning and competitive strategy:
Waymo is Driving Away with Autonomous Transportation
A strong consensus long position emerged immediately: Waymo’s product superiority combines with devastating unit economics to create an unassailable moat. At $21 for rides that cost $105 in Uber Black, Waymo demonstrates 75-80% cost reduction by eliminating labor. Leaders who’ve experienced the product universally prefer it to human drivers, citing safety, consistency, and price. The training data advantage (millions of miles weekly) creates a flywheel competitors cannot match. Tesla’s full self-driving lags significantly (2x the accident rate in Austin), and the training data narrative is false. Tesla sends back only intervention data, not general mileage. Uber and Lyft face existential threat.
“The most shocking thing about Waymo isn’t that it drives itself. It’s the price. A 20-minute ride from the wharf to the Four Seasons that would have been $105 in Uber Black cost me just $21.” (...)
Nvidia’s Margin Structure Is Unsustainable
Multiple leaders questioned whether 80% margins on semiconductor infrastructure represent a durable advantage or a temporary bubble. The comparison to Cisco’s dot-com era dominance (expensive hardware with high margins that got commoditized rapidly) surfaced repeatedly. As AI models become capable of chip design at human expert levels (expected by decade’s end), the moat in chip design evaporates. Fabrication becomes the only remaining bottleneck, potentially benefiting TSMC while threatening Nvidia’s margin structure. The certainty: some player will find a way to attack that margin at the infrastructure layer.
“The amount of money going into depreciating hardware with high margins is the exact same story as Cisco. Somebody will find a way to eat that margin.”
Multiple leaders questioned whether 80% margins on semiconductor infrastructure represent a durable advantage or a temporary bubble. The comparison to Cisco’s dot-com era dominance (expensive hardware with high margins that got commoditized rapidly) surfaced repeatedly. As AI models become capable of chip design at human expert levels (expected by decade’s end), the moat in chip design evaporates. Fabrication becomes the only remaining bottleneck, potentially benefiting TSMC while threatening Nvidia’s margin structure. The certainty: some player will find a way to attack that margin at the infrastructure layer.
“The amount of money going into depreciating hardware with high margins is the exact same story as Cisco. Somebody will find a way to eat that margin.”
The Legal Tech Disruption Finally Arrives
Leaders identified a major shift in legal services: companies providing outcome-based pricing by owning law firms and powering them with AI platforms. Rather than helping law firms become more efficient (which creates perverse incentives against adoption), these platforms acquire 300-person firms, empower attorneys with AI tools, and offer flat-fee pricing to Fortune 500 companies, promising 90% cost reductions. The billable hour model prevents traditional law firms from capturing AI productivity gains, creating vulnerability to disruptors who align incentives properly.
“Traditional law firms are facing a conundrum. Why do you want to be 300% more efficient? Now you have to bill 3 times as many hours. AI-Native law firms like Eudia are killing the billable hour.”
Strategic Themes
Theme 1: The Labor Cost Revolution Creates Winner-Take-All Dynamics
The Problem: Labor represents 75-80% of costs in most service businesses, and AI’s ability to eliminate those costs is creating unprecedented pricing power for early adopters.
Waymo’s pricing advantage illustrates the magnitude of disruption. A $21 ride replacing a $105 Uber Black ride represents an 80% cost reduction, precisely the labor component eliminated by autonomy. We’re seeing order-of-magnitude transformation here. One leader observed: “75 to 80% of every business is labor. All these things are coming and taking labor out. Everything’s going to start just collapsing.”
The implications extend beyond transportation. Zipline’s drone delivery captures 3% of DoorDash’s business in Dallas alone by eliminating driver labor. Sierra and similar enterprise AI companies provide “shovel ready” customer service automation that companies can deploy immediately. Legal tech platforms cut costs 90% by eliminating attorney time on routine work.
First movers in labor automation can underprice incumbents so dramatically that competitive response becomes impossible. Uber cannot match Waymo’s $21 price point with human drivers. DoorDash cannot compete with drone delivery’s 15-minute coffee delivery economics. The winner-take-all dynamic isn’t about slightly better products but about fundamentally different cost structures.
The Insight: Labor cost elimination creates moats so deep that late followers cannot compete on price, quality, or experience simultaneously. The first company to achieve reliable automation in a category can price at levels that make the entire existing industry unprofitable while still maintaining healthy margins.
Leadership Implication: Identify your labor-intensive processes and attack them with extreme urgency. The first mover advantage in labor automation is more durable than typical technology advantages because it’s structural, not feature-based. Once a competitor eliminates 75% of costs, you cannot gradually catch up. You must completely rebuild your business model. In categories where automation is viable, assume you have 12-18 months before a competitor makes your entire cost structure obsolete.
by Dion Lim, CEO Dinner Insights | Read more:
Image: Christian Waske on Unsplash[ed. See also: The AI Wildfire Is Coming. It's Going to Be Very Painful and Incredibly Healthy. (CEO).]
Friday, November 28, 2025
Why So Many Book Covers Look the Same
If books have design eras, we’re in an age of statement wallpaper and fatty text. We have the internet to thank — and not just the interface but the economy that’s evolved around it. From the leather-bound volumes of old to lurid mass-market paperbacks, book covers were never designed in a vacuum. Their presentation had everything to do with the way books were made, where and how and to whom they were sold. And when you look at book covers right now, what you’ll see blaring back at you, bold and dazzling, is a highly competitive marketing landscape dominated by online retail, social media, and their curiously symbiotic rival, the resurgent independent bookstore...
Left with blunt tools and fuzzy math, book marketing and design departments resort to instinct and look for ways to produce the most visible proof of concept: publicity. And where do we go for publicity in this age of tech disruption? Social media.
Books that are designed to render well on digital screens also look great on social.
by Margot Boyer-Dry, Vulture | Read more:
Image: uncredited/via:
Image: uncredited/via:
[ed. Followup to the post below (Decline of Deviance). I have a strong aversion to any book that looks like this, which to me translates as 'unserious', 'hyped', and, (unfortunately) 'chick lit'.]
The Decline of Deviance
Where has all the weirdness gone?
I’m not the first to notice something strange going on—or, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are:
a) very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before
b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and
c) purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.
When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.
by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History | Read more:
Every new apartment building looks like this:
b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and
c) purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.
When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.
by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History | Read more:
Images: Author and Alex Murrell
[ed. Interesting thesis. For example, architecture:]
***
The physical world, too, looks increasingly same-y. As Alex Murrell has documented, every cafe in the world now has the same bourgeois boho style:Every new apartment building looks like this:
Arlo Guthrie: Alice's Restaurant - Illustrated
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”
We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version.
by Open Culture | Read more:
[ed. Never gets old (maybe a day late : ) We've got tons of Christmas songs but this is the only Thanksgiving song I can think of.]
Thursday, November 27, 2025
Joni Mitchell - Joni's Jazz
[ed. What a welcome surprise. A new archival release focusing on Joni's jazz evolution throughout her career, dedicated to Wayne Shorter who died in 2023. So much good stuff here - 61 tracks (full album). See also: Joni’s Jazz Reviewed: Short on rarities but steeped in a love of the genre (Mojo).]
Job Hugging and the Ten-Year Trap
The Bullshit Job Is Real. Leaving It Is Almost Impossible.
The career confusion I usually write about involves people in their early twenties trying to figure out which direction to go. But there’s a different kind of confusion that sits with people who are ten or fifteen years into something. They already chose. They’ve been executing that choice for over a decade. The question now is whether to abandon the investment.
This is the person who spent twelve years qualifying for a role that might exist for five more. Who’s watching their industry consolidate, their company restructure for the third time, their colleagues get made redundant in waves. Who makes decent money, holds seniority they earned, and knows that both might evaporate in the next round of cuts.
The question sitting with them: whether the last decade was preparation for obsolescence.
The Ten-Year Trap
Ten years into anything builds three locks simultaneously.
The economic lock is straightforward. A decade of progression means a salary that supports a particular life. Mortgage, school fees, the lifestyle that assumes this income level. Your household budget depends on it. Your partner’s career decisions factor it in. Leaving means accepting a significant pay cut or starting over in a field where you’re competing with people ten years younger who cost half as much.
The psychological lock runs deeper. You’ve been a senior whatever-you-are for years. The title is how you introduce yourself, how your parents describe you, how you think about your place in the world. The identity has fused with the person. Starting over means becoming junior again, and that feels like regression even when it’s rational movement.
Then there’s the skills problem. You’ve spent ten years becoming excellent at navigating a particular regulatory framework, or marketing a channel that’s dying, or accumulating institutional knowledge of systems that won’t outlast you. The expertise might not transfer anywhere else. You won’t know until you try, and trying means leaving.
Each year adds weight to these locks. The salary increases. The identity solidifies. The skills specialise further. You’ve optimised yourself for one context, and now that context is uncertain.
Why This Hits Different
This has happened before. Miners watched pits close. Typists saw word processors arrive. Factory workers watched production move overseas. Entire industries disappeared, often rapidly, leaving people with skills that had no market.
But those were working-class jobs. The middle-class professional path was supposed to be different. University degree, graduate scheme, steady progression, pension at the end. The bargain was: get educated, specialise in something professional, and you’ll have security.
That bargain is breaking for a different class of worker now. The comfortable middle-skilled roles, the ones requiring degrees and years of training, are the ones getting automated or consolidated. People who did everything right by the old rules are discovering their expertise has an expiration date.
The decline happens fast enough that you can’t pivot gradually, but slow enough that you keep thinking you have time. Restructures happen every eighteen months. Colleagues disappear in rounds. The company says it’s about efficiency, about staying competitive, about the future. You watch the org chart shrink and know that your highly paid, highly specific role could be next.
The Recognition Point
Something specific triggers the realisation. Someone five years younger gets made redundant and you understand that seniority makes you expensive to keep. You see your exact role automated at a competitor. You’re in your third restructure in five years and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. You try explaining what you do and realise you’re describing institutional knowledge of a dying system rather than a transferable skill.
The recognition makes everything worse because now you know you’re trapped and you’re still not leaving.
The questions that follow have no good answers. How severe is the decline? Is this slow erosion over another decade or rapid collapse where half the roles disappear in three years? Industry analysis is always backwards-looking. By the time consensus forms that a sector is dying, it’s already dead.
What transfers? You’ve become excellent at something specific. Maybe it’s risk assessment and it works everywhere. Maybe it’s navigating particular regulations and it works nowhere else. You discover this in job interviews, explaining why someone should hire you for work you’ve never done, competing against people who have.
The financial calculation involves variables you can’t control. How long could you survive without income? What pay cut is survivable? These depend on your partner’s salary, your savings, your mortgage, your tolerance for uncertainty. They have to be assessed without admitting you’re considering blowing up the household finances.
Timing becomes impossible to judge. Leave now and you preserve some career momentum. You’re choosing to go rather than being pushed. But you’re walking away from salary and seniority you might keep for another three years. Wait for redundancy and you get a package, but you’re also older, in a market flooded with other redundancies, and you’ve lost time you could have spent retraining.
The worst question sits underneath everything: what if your skills are too specific and you genuinely can’t transfer? What if the last ten years made you excellent at something nobody else needs? What if you leave, burn through savings trying to pivot, and discover you’re competing for entry-level positions against twenty-five-year-olds who’ll work for half what you need?
None of these have answers because they all depend on information you don’t possess. You can’t know your skills transfer until you’ve transferred them. You can’t know when redundancies hit until they hit. You can’t know if you’ve waited too long until you’ve already waited too long.
Some people can move with incomplete information and accept they might be wrong. Most people can’t. The uncertainty paralyses, so they wait for certainty, and by the time certainty arrives, the decision has been made for them.
by Alex McCann, The Republic of Letters | Read more:
Image: istock/Getty via
[ed. ed. See also: Confessions of a job hugger: Still at my desk, still in denial (ADN):]
"Job huggers — employees clinging to roles long past their expiration date — lurk in cubicles in many workplaces. According to Monster’s 2025 Job Hugging Report, 48% of surveyed employees say they stay in their current role for comfort, security or stability.
For these employees, job hugging is the workplace version of comfort food: familiar, filling and guaranteed to leave you sluggish. They don’t love their jobs but don’t see anything better on the horizon. They stay because the devil they know offers dental coverage, even though the spark that once made them excited about their jobs wheezes for oxygen.
Behind many “grateful to have a job” smiles sits quiet dread. Sunday nights hit like sentencing hearings. Job huggers run mental marathons of justification: Maybe my boss will retire. Maybe next quarter will improve. Maybe leadership will finally hire that extra person they promised back when TikTok was new.
Spoiler: They won’t.
The truth: Job huggers don’t cling to jobs; they cling to security, identity and even social connection. Letting go of a problem job before an employee finds a new landing spot feels like jumping from a plane without a functioning parachute."
The question sitting with them: whether the last decade was preparation for obsolescence.
The Ten-Year Trap
Ten years into anything builds three locks simultaneously.
The economic lock is straightforward. A decade of progression means a salary that supports a particular life. Mortgage, school fees, the lifestyle that assumes this income level. Your household budget depends on it. Your partner’s career decisions factor it in. Leaving means accepting a significant pay cut or starting over in a field where you’re competing with people ten years younger who cost half as much.
The psychological lock runs deeper. You’ve been a senior whatever-you-are for years. The title is how you introduce yourself, how your parents describe you, how you think about your place in the world. The identity has fused with the person. Starting over means becoming junior again, and that feels like regression even when it’s rational movement.
Then there’s the skills problem. You’ve spent ten years becoming excellent at navigating a particular regulatory framework, or marketing a channel that’s dying, or accumulating institutional knowledge of systems that won’t outlast you. The expertise might not transfer anywhere else. You won’t know until you try, and trying means leaving.
Each year adds weight to these locks. The salary increases. The identity solidifies. The skills specialise further. You’ve optimised yourself for one context, and now that context is uncertain.
Why This Hits Different
This has happened before. Miners watched pits close. Typists saw word processors arrive. Factory workers watched production move overseas. Entire industries disappeared, often rapidly, leaving people with skills that had no market.
But those were working-class jobs. The middle-class professional path was supposed to be different. University degree, graduate scheme, steady progression, pension at the end. The bargain was: get educated, specialise in something professional, and you’ll have security.
That bargain is breaking for a different class of worker now. The comfortable middle-skilled roles, the ones requiring degrees and years of training, are the ones getting automated or consolidated. People who did everything right by the old rules are discovering their expertise has an expiration date.
The decline happens fast enough that you can’t pivot gradually, but slow enough that you keep thinking you have time. Restructures happen every eighteen months. Colleagues disappear in rounds. The company says it’s about efficiency, about staying competitive, about the future. You watch the org chart shrink and know that your highly paid, highly specific role could be next.
The Recognition Point
Something specific triggers the realisation. Someone five years younger gets made redundant and you understand that seniority makes you expensive to keep. You see your exact role automated at a competitor. You’re in your third restructure in five years and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. You try explaining what you do and realise you’re describing institutional knowledge of a dying system rather than a transferable skill.
The recognition makes everything worse because now you know you’re trapped and you’re still not leaving.
The questions that follow have no good answers. How severe is the decline? Is this slow erosion over another decade or rapid collapse where half the roles disappear in three years? Industry analysis is always backwards-looking. By the time consensus forms that a sector is dying, it’s already dead.
What transfers? You’ve become excellent at something specific. Maybe it’s risk assessment and it works everywhere. Maybe it’s navigating particular regulations and it works nowhere else. You discover this in job interviews, explaining why someone should hire you for work you’ve never done, competing against people who have.
The financial calculation involves variables you can’t control. How long could you survive without income? What pay cut is survivable? These depend on your partner’s salary, your savings, your mortgage, your tolerance for uncertainty. They have to be assessed without admitting you’re considering blowing up the household finances.
Timing becomes impossible to judge. Leave now and you preserve some career momentum. You’re choosing to go rather than being pushed. But you’re walking away from salary and seniority you might keep for another three years. Wait for redundancy and you get a package, but you’re also older, in a market flooded with other redundancies, and you’ve lost time you could have spent retraining.
The worst question sits underneath everything: what if your skills are too specific and you genuinely can’t transfer? What if the last ten years made you excellent at something nobody else needs? What if you leave, burn through savings trying to pivot, and discover you’re competing for entry-level positions against twenty-five-year-olds who’ll work for half what you need?
None of these have answers because they all depend on information you don’t possess. You can’t know your skills transfer until you’ve transferred them. You can’t know when redundancies hit until they hit. You can’t know if you’ve waited too long until you’ve already waited too long.
Some people can move with incomplete information and accept they might be wrong. Most people can’t. The uncertainty paralyses, so they wait for certainty, and by the time certainty arrives, the decision has been made for them.
by Alex McCann, The Republic of Letters | Read more:
Image: istock/Getty via
[ed. ed. See also: Confessions of a job hugger: Still at my desk, still in denial (ADN):]
"Job huggers — employees clinging to roles long past their expiration date — lurk in cubicles in many workplaces. According to Monster’s 2025 Job Hugging Report, 48% of surveyed employees say they stay in their current role for comfort, security or stability.
For these employees, job hugging is the workplace version of comfort food: familiar, filling and guaranteed to leave you sluggish. They don’t love their jobs but don’t see anything better on the horizon. They stay because the devil they know offers dental coverage, even though the spark that once made them excited about their jobs wheezes for oxygen.
Behind many “grateful to have a job” smiles sits quiet dread. Sunday nights hit like sentencing hearings. Job huggers run mental marathons of justification: Maybe my boss will retire. Maybe next quarter will improve. Maybe leadership will finally hire that extra person they promised back when TikTok was new.
Spoiler: They won’t.
The truth: Job huggers don’t cling to jobs; they cling to security, identity and even social connection. Letting go of a problem job before an employee finds a new landing spot feels like jumping from a plane without a functioning parachute."
The Fall of the English Department
... and rise of new stewards
A decline in public interest in reading literature corresponds to the decline of the English department. By all accounts, the state of public literacy has only gotten worse with reading for pleasure in the U.S. adult population having plummeted over the past 40 years. Fewer than half of all adults read at least one work of literature in 2015, a concerning statistic that was described as “the lowest percentage . . . since NEA surveys began in 1982.” In 2022, less than half of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year.
And yet… Even as university English departments pared back structured canonical curricula and major enrollments fell, there remain signs of renewed public appetite for serious reading and study of literature.
Looking out on the state of things in 2025, it is clear there are major changes afoot. A major cultural reorientation is underway. The 2020s promise to be a big decade for the revival of reading the classics. Online initiatives such as The Catherine Project and my Versed Community (now with 600 members) demonstrate a renewed desire for encountering works of literature in conversation and with rigor.
Where the universities have failed, some non-academic readers and self-learners are committing themselves to the life of the mind. Readers, writers, “autodidacts,” and communities of learners outside the university are preserving tradition, sharing knowledge and wisdom, improving language, experimenting creatively, and cultivating new fields of the imagination. The public commitment to literature is increasingly counter-cultural. Readers are turning to the canon out of a desire for meaning and beauty.
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called these readers the “clerisy,” a class of readers that included those outside the academy (teachers, students, skilled and frontline workers, etc.) whose continued education and interest in the arts preserve and support the cultural life of a nation. The health of a nation depends upon this class, which is not a class of academics or scholars or theologians but of average readers capable of advancing learning in all branches of knowledge. He believed that some members of this clerisy would reside inside the academy but most of them would be living lives outside of the universities. In their hands was the “strongest security and the surest provision, both for the permanence and the progressive advance of whatever (laws, institutions, tenures, rights, privileges, freedoms, obligations, etc.) constitute the public weal.”
On platforms like Substack, YouTube, and public reading groups, many are studying and writing about great works of world literature more for soul-formation and cultural belonging than for credentialization.
The custodianship of literary culture has passed from institutions to the public reader, those seeking wisdom, meaning, beauty, and intellectual depth in an age of distraction. Without the promise of credentials or any external obligation, they have become the new stewards of the tradition. They’re buying classics, reading and expanding the canon, writing and reading close-reading essays and lectures online, and joining grassroots salons. Among them, the idea of “required reading” seems foreign. Reading has become instead voluntary devotion.
This isn’t optimistic guff. This is my firsthand experience, something that very few, if any, academics have. My students and friends on my Versed Community have convinced me that the relevance and vitality of literature do not depend upon the academy. It really rests on all of us. My experience teaching on Versed is actively shaping the way I think of my vocation in the world as a “professor” without an institution and the future of literature and the arts.
Communal learning, even though not “in-person,” is proving that the past works of literature are being enlarged by the present. This renewed stewardship is less bureaucratic and more intimate, less obligatory and more communal, and it may prove the stronger for it. I used to think that the decline of the English department signaled the death of literary study. I have learned that it signals a return of literature to common life and personal encounter. Reading is returning again to the way it was before it was professionalized by the academic study of it. It’s becoming the public commons.
What’s happening is a true renaissance of reading. And it’s important that this revival grows into a place of creativity. We don’t need to recover the golden age of the English department, as much as I admire a systematic approach to literature and its history. We need to create something new, a new relation to the canon. We need a revival of literature that feeds both intellect and spirit and one that is willing to encourage a productive and creative relationship to the ever-growing canon. That’s what our present circumstances offer.
And yet… Even as university English departments pared back structured canonical curricula and major enrollments fell, there remain signs of renewed public appetite for serious reading and study of literature.
Where the universities have failed, some non-academic readers and self-learners are committing themselves to the life of the mind. Readers, writers, “autodidacts,” and communities of learners outside the university are preserving tradition, sharing knowledge and wisdom, improving language, experimenting creatively, and cultivating new fields of the imagination. The public commitment to literature is increasingly counter-cultural. Readers are turning to the canon out of a desire for meaning and beauty.
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called these readers the “clerisy,” a class of readers that included those outside the academy (teachers, students, skilled and frontline workers, etc.) whose continued education and interest in the arts preserve and support the cultural life of a nation. The health of a nation depends upon this class, which is not a class of academics or scholars or theologians but of average readers capable of advancing learning in all branches of knowledge. He believed that some members of this clerisy would reside inside the academy but most of them would be living lives outside of the universities. In their hands was the “strongest security and the surest provision, both for the permanence and the progressive advance of whatever (laws, institutions, tenures, rights, privileges, freedoms, obligations, etc.) constitute the public weal.”
On platforms like Substack, YouTube, and public reading groups, many are studying and writing about great works of world literature more for soul-formation and cultural belonging than for credentialization.
The custodianship of literary culture has passed from institutions to the public reader, those seeking wisdom, meaning, beauty, and intellectual depth in an age of distraction. Without the promise of credentials or any external obligation, they have become the new stewards of the tradition. They’re buying classics, reading and expanding the canon, writing and reading close-reading essays and lectures online, and joining grassroots salons. Among them, the idea of “required reading” seems foreign. Reading has become instead voluntary devotion.
This isn’t optimistic guff. This is my firsthand experience, something that very few, if any, academics have. My students and friends on my Versed Community have convinced me that the relevance and vitality of literature do not depend upon the academy. It really rests on all of us. My experience teaching on Versed is actively shaping the way I think of my vocation in the world as a “professor” without an institution and the future of literature and the arts.
Communal learning, even though not “in-person,” is proving that the past works of literature are being enlarged by the present. This renewed stewardship is less bureaucratic and more intimate, less obligatory and more communal, and it may prove the stronger for it. I used to think that the decline of the English department signaled the death of literary study. I have learned that it signals a return of literature to common life and personal encounter. Reading is returning again to the way it was before it was professionalized by the academic study of it. It’s becoming the public commons.
What’s happening is a true renaissance of reading. And it’s important that this revival grows into a place of creativity. We don’t need to recover the golden age of the English department, as much as I admire a systematic approach to literature and its history. We need to create something new, a new relation to the canon. We need a revival of literature that feeds both intellect and spirit and one that is willing to encourage a productive and creative relationship to the ever-growing canon. That’s what our present circumstances offer.
by Adam Walker, Substack | Read more:
Image: William Shakespeare, The First Folio, 1623 via
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person
I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person.
But I absolutely intend to leave at some point. And when I do, you should define me by whatever I do next, unless it’s also evil, in which case, define me by how I ultimately spend my retirement.
Because here’s the thing: It’s not me committing these acts of evil. I’m just following orders (until I get promoted; then I’ll get to give them). But until then, I do whatever my supervisor tells me to do, and that’s just how work works. Sure, I chose to be here, and yes, I could almost certainly find a job elsewhere, but redoing my résumé would take time. Also, I don’t feel like it. Besides, once a year, my company mandates all employees to help clean up a local beach, and I almost always go.
Speaking of the good we do at work, sometimes I wear a cool Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, and it’s commonly accepted that bad people don’t wear shirts with flowers on them. That’s just a fact. There’s something so silly about discussing opportunities to increase profits for international arms dealers while wearing a purple button-down covered in bright hibiscus blossoms.
And when it comes to making things even, I put my money where my mouth is. I might make more than 99 percent of all Americans, but I also make sure to donate almost 1 percent of my salary to nonprofits. This way, I can wear their company tote bag to my local food coop. Did I mention I shop at a local food coop? It’s quite literally the least I could do.
Let me give you an example. Last quarter, I led a team of engineers on an initiative to grow my company’s artificial intelligence data centers, which use millions of gallons of water per day. My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the planet, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect with my own humanity through nature. I also bike to and from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown for an exorbitant salary. Check out this social media post of me biking up a mountain. See? This is who I really am.
Does the leadership at my company promote a xenophobic agenda and use the wealth I help them acquire to donate directly to bigoted causes and politicians I find despicable? Yeah, sure. Did I celebrate my last birthday at Drag Brunch? Also yes. I even tipped with five-dollar bills. I contain multitudes, and would appreciate it if you focused on the brunch one.
Mathematically, it might seem like I spend a disproportionate amount of my time making the world a significantly less safe and less empathetic place, but are you counting all the hours I spend sleeping? You should. And when you do, you’ll find that my ratio of evil hours to not evil hours is much more even, numerically.
I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even have object permanence, which is oddly similar to the sociopathic detachment with which I now think about other humans.
And besides, I don’t plan to stay at this job forever, just for my prime working years, until I can install a new state-of-the-art infinity pool in my country home. The problem is that whenever I think I’m going to leave, there’s always the potential for a promotion, and also a new upgrade for the pool, like underwater disco lights. Time really flies when you’re not thinking about the effect you have on others.
Mathematically, it might seem like I spend a disproportionate amount of my time making the world a significantly less safe and less empathetic place, but are you counting all the hours I spend sleeping? You should. And when you do, you’ll find that my ratio of evil hours to not evil hours is much more even, numerically.
I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even have object permanence, which is oddly similar to the sociopathic detachment with which I now think about other humans.
And besides, I don’t plan to stay at this job forever, just for my prime working years, until I can install a new state-of-the-art infinity pool in my country home. The problem is that whenever I think I’m going to leave, there’s always the potential for a promotion, and also a new upgrade for the pool, like underwater disco lights. Time really flies when you’re not thinking about the effect you have on others.
But I absolutely intend to leave at some point. And when I do, you should define me by whatever I do next, unless it’s also evil, in which case, define me by how I ultimately spend my retirement.
Because here’s the thing: It’s not me committing these acts of evil. I’m just following orders (until I get promoted; then I’ll get to give them). But until then, I do whatever my supervisor tells me to do, and that’s just how work works. Sure, I chose to be here, and yes, I could almost certainly find a job elsewhere, but redoing my résumé would take time. Also, I don’t feel like it. Besides, once a year, my company mandates all employees to help clean up a local beach, and I almost always go.
Speaking of the good we do at work, sometimes I wear a cool Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, and it’s commonly accepted that bad people don’t wear shirts with flowers on them. That’s just a fact. There’s something so silly about discussing opportunities to increase profits for international arms dealers while wearing a purple button-down covered in bright hibiscus blossoms.
And when it comes to making things even, I put my money where my mouth is. I might make more than 99 percent of all Americans, but I also make sure to donate almost 1 percent of my salary to nonprofits. This way, I can wear their company tote bag to my local food coop. Did I mention I shop at a local food coop? It’s quite literally the least I could do.
by Emily Bressler, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: Illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Loco Moco
This classic Hawaiian dish is similar to Japanese hambagu, a ground beef patty topped with a ketchup-based sauce, but loco moco is heartier, served atop a pile of white rice, smothered with caramelized onion gravy and topped with a fried egg. People in Hawaii enjoy it for breakfast, lunch, dinner or any time in between. This version is adapted from “Aloha Kitchen: Recipes From Hawai‘i,” by Alana Kysar, a cookbook of Hawaiian classics. - recipe:
[ed. Never thought I'd see Loco Moco in the NY Times food section. What next? Spam musubi?]
via:
The ‘New’ Solution for the N.Y.C. Housing Crisis: Single-Room Apartments
Single-room apartments once symbolized everything wrong with New York City. They didn’t have private kitchens or bathrooms and were seen as cheap places where crime festered, drugs flourished and the poor suffered daily indignities.
Today, city officials say the solution to the housing crisis involves building a lot more of them.
The apartments can resemble dormitories or suites, and could become cheaper housing options in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
“We’re trying to make housing more affordable and create more supply,” said Ahmed Tigani, the acting commissioner of the housing department.
Such apartments, where kitchens and bathrooms are often shared, can cost $1,500 or less in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, where median rents easily exceed $3,000 per month.
The push underscores how an extreme shortage of housing has led to a turnaround in attitudes toward forms of shared housing, which have long been a controversial feature of cities worldwide.
Cities like London, Zurich and Seoul, with a thirst for cheap homes, are exploring similar ideas, as are other places in America. Other cities, like Hong Kong, still struggle to make the homes livable.
Few cities, though, have their histories as intertwined with these types of homes as New York. A population boom in the first half of the 20th century led to thousands of people cramming into flophouses, boardinghouses and S.R.O.s.
There are about 30,000 to 40,000 left, down from more than 100,000 in New York City in the early 20th century, according to a 2018 study from the N.Y.U. Furman Center. But the homes became associated with poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
The city passed laws preventing the construction of new units and the division of apartment buildings into S.R.O.s, leading to their steady decline over the decades.
“Overcrowding, overcharging and the creation of disease and crime-breeding slums have been the direct result of this conversion practice,” Mayor Robert F. Wagner said in 1954 when signing one of these bills. An adviser to a City Council committee said at the time that the growth in S.R.O.s would “reduce New York City to cubicle-room living.”
In some ways, that is now part of the idea.
The obvious benefit, city officials said, is that S.R.O.s and other shared housing would be cheap. But they might also better match the city’s changing demographics.
The number of single-person households grew almost 9 percent between 2018 and 2023, city officials said. The number of households with people living together who are not a family — for example, roommates — grew more than 11 percent over that same time period.
Because of the housing shortage, many people end up joining together to rent bigger homes better suited for families, said Michael Sandler, the housing department’s associate commissioner of neighborhood strategies. Building new shared housing might free up those apartments. (...)
The new legislation would also improve certain safety standards for shared housing, such as allowing only up to three apartments per kitchen or per bathroom, Mr. Sandler said. It would require shared housing to have sprinklers and provide enough electricity per room to run small appliances.
Allowing new shared housing could help provide new living options for young single people; people experiencing homelessness; older people and people just moving to city, city officials said.
“These are not yesterday’s S.R.O.’s,” said Mr. Bottcher, the councilman. “They’re modern, flexible, well-managed homes that can meet the needs of a diverse population.”
by Mihir Zaveri, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
[ed. These and other types of housing options should always be available. Just don't make people commit to 12 month leases (making tiny housing problems even worse). These are transitory spaces. Month to month, or six month leases should be fine, and probably more flexible for most people.]
Today, city officials say the solution to the housing crisis involves building a lot more of them.
Councilman Erik Bottcher, a Democrat who represents parts of Manhattan, introduced a bill on Tuesday that would allow the construction of new single-room-occupancy apartments as small as 100 square feet for the first time in decades. The legislation, backed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, would make it easier to convert office buildings into these types of homes, also known as S.R.O.s.
“We’re trying to make housing more affordable and create more supply,” said Ahmed Tigani, the acting commissioner of the housing department.
Such apartments, where kitchens and bathrooms are often shared, can cost $1,500 or less in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, where median rents easily exceed $3,000 per month.
The push underscores how an extreme shortage of housing has led to a turnaround in attitudes toward forms of shared housing, which have long been a controversial feature of cities worldwide.
Cities like London, Zurich and Seoul, with a thirst for cheap homes, are exploring similar ideas, as are other places in America. Other cities, like Hong Kong, still struggle to make the homes livable.
Few cities, though, have their histories as intertwined with these types of homes as New York. A population boom in the first half of the 20th century led to thousands of people cramming into flophouses, boardinghouses and S.R.O.s.
There are about 30,000 to 40,000 left, down from more than 100,000 in New York City in the early 20th century, according to a 2018 study from the N.Y.U. Furman Center. But the homes became associated with poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
The city passed laws preventing the construction of new units and the division of apartment buildings into S.R.O.s, leading to their steady decline over the decades.
“Overcrowding, overcharging and the creation of disease and crime-breeding slums have been the direct result of this conversion practice,” Mayor Robert F. Wagner said in 1954 when signing one of these bills. An adviser to a City Council committee said at the time that the growth in S.R.O.s would “reduce New York City to cubicle-room living.”
In some ways, that is now part of the idea.
The obvious benefit, city officials said, is that S.R.O.s and other shared housing would be cheap. But they might also better match the city’s changing demographics.
The number of single-person households grew almost 9 percent between 2018 and 2023, city officials said. The number of households with people living together who are not a family — for example, roommates — grew more than 11 percent over that same time period.
Because of the housing shortage, many people end up joining together to rent bigger homes better suited for families, said Michael Sandler, the housing department’s associate commissioner of neighborhood strategies. Building new shared housing might free up those apartments. (...)
The new legislation would also improve certain safety standards for shared housing, such as allowing only up to three apartments per kitchen or per bathroom, Mr. Sandler said. It would require shared housing to have sprinklers and provide enough electricity per room to run small appliances.
Allowing new shared housing could help provide new living options for young single people; people experiencing homelessness; older people and people just moving to city, city officials said.
“These are not yesterday’s S.R.O.’s,” said Mr. Bottcher, the councilman. “They’re modern, flexible, well-managed homes that can meet the needs of a diverse population.”
by Mihir Zaveri, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
[ed. These and other types of housing options should always be available. Just don't make people commit to 12 month leases (making tiny housing problems even worse). These are transitory spaces. Month to month, or six month leases should be fine, and probably more flexible for most people.]
The Silent Crowd
It is widely believed that Thomas Jefferson was terrified of public speaking. John Adams once said of him, “During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.” During his eight years in the White House, Jefferson seems to have limited his speechmaking to two inaugural addresses, which he simply read out loud “in so low a tone that few heard it.”
I remember how relieved I was to learn this. To know that it was possible to succeed in life while avoiding the podium was very consoling—for about five minutes. The truth is that not even Jefferson could follow in his own footsteps today. It is now inconceivable that a person could become president of the United States through the power of his writing alone. To refuse to speak in public is to refuse a career in politics—and many other careers as well.
In fact, Jefferson would be unlikely to succeed as an author today. It used to be that a person could just write books and, if he were lucky, people would read them. Now he must stand in front of crowds of varying sizes and say that he has written these books—otherwise, no one will know that they exist. Radio and television interviews offer new venues for stage fright: Some shows put one in front of a live audience of a few hundred people and an invisible audience of millions. You cannot appear on The Daily Show holding a piece of paper and begin reading your lines like Thomas Jefferson. (...)
Fear of public speaking is also a fertile source of psychological suffering elsewhere in life. I can remember dreading any event where being asked to speak was a possibility. I have to give a toast at your wedding? Wonderful. I can now spend the entire ceremony, and much of the preceding week, feeling like a condemned man in view of the scaffold.
Pathological self-consciousness in front of a crowd is more than ordinary anxiety: it lies closer to the core of the self. It seems, in fact, to be the self—the very feeling we call “I”—but magnified grotesquely. There are few instances in life when the sense of being someone becomes so onerous. (...)
Of course, many people have solved the problem of what to do when a thousand pairs of eyes are looking their way. And some of them, for whatever reason, are natural performers. From childhood, they have wanted nothing more than to display their talents to a crowd. Many of these people are narcissists, of course, and hollowed out in unenviable ways. Where your self-consciousness has become a dying star, theirs has become a wormhole to a parallel universe. They don’t suffer much there, perhaps, but they don’t quite make contact here either. And many natural performers are comfortable only within a certain frame. It is always interesting, for instance, to see a famous actor wracked by fear while accepting an Academy Award. Simply being oneself before an audience can be terrifying even for those who perform for a living.
Needless to say, I am not a born performer. Nor am I naturally comfortable standing in front of a group of friends or strangers to deliver a message. However, I have always been someone who had things he wanted to say. This marriage of fear and desire is an unhappy one—and many people are stuck in it.
At the end of my senior year in high school, I learned that I was to be the class valedictorian. I declined the honor. And I managed to get into my thirties without directly confronting my fear of public speaking. At the age of thirty-three, I enrolled in graduate school, where I gave a few scientific presentations while lurking in the shadows of PowerPoint. Still, it seemed that I might be able to skirt my problem with a little luck—until I began to feel as though a large pit had opened in the center of my life, and I was circling the edge. It was becoming professionally and psychologically impossible to turn away.
The reckoning finally came when I published my first book, The End of Faith. Suddenly, I was thirty-seven and faced with the prospect of a book tour. I briefly considered avoiding all public appearances and becoming a man of mystery. Had I done so, I would still be fairly mysterious, and you probably wouldn’t be reading these words.
I cannot personally attest to most forms of self-overcoming: I don’t know what it is like to recover from addiction, lose a hundred pounds, or fight in a war. I can say from experience, however, that it is possible to change one’s relationship to public speaking.
And the process need not take long. In fact, I have spoken publicly no more than fifty times in my life, and many of my earliest appearances were for fairly high stakes, being either televised, or against opponents who would have dearly loved to see me fail, or both. Given where I started, I believe that almost anyone can transcend a fear of the podium. (Whether he has something interesting to say is another matter, of course—one that he would do well to sort out before attracting a crowd.)
If you have been avoiding public speaking, I hope you find the following points helpful:
1. Admit that you have a problem
I remember how relieved I was to learn this. To know that it was possible to succeed in life while avoiding the podium was very consoling—for about five minutes. The truth is that not even Jefferson could follow in his own footsteps today. It is now inconceivable that a person could become president of the United States through the power of his writing alone. To refuse to speak in public is to refuse a career in politics—and many other careers as well.
In fact, Jefferson would be unlikely to succeed as an author today. It used to be that a person could just write books and, if he were lucky, people would read them. Now he must stand in front of crowds of varying sizes and say that he has written these books—otherwise, no one will know that they exist. Radio and television interviews offer new venues for stage fright: Some shows put one in front of a live audience of a few hundred people and an invisible audience of millions. You cannot appear on The Daily Show holding a piece of paper and begin reading your lines like Thomas Jefferson. (...)
Fear of public speaking is also a fertile source of psychological suffering elsewhere in life. I can remember dreading any event where being asked to speak was a possibility. I have to give a toast at your wedding? Wonderful. I can now spend the entire ceremony, and much of the preceding week, feeling like a condemned man in view of the scaffold.
Pathological self-consciousness in front of a crowd is more than ordinary anxiety: it lies closer to the core of the self. It seems, in fact, to be the self—the very feeling we call “I”—but magnified grotesquely. There are few instances in life when the sense of being someone becomes so onerous. (...)
Of course, many people have solved the problem of what to do when a thousand pairs of eyes are looking their way. And some of them, for whatever reason, are natural performers. From childhood, they have wanted nothing more than to display their talents to a crowd. Many of these people are narcissists, of course, and hollowed out in unenviable ways. Where your self-consciousness has become a dying star, theirs has become a wormhole to a parallel universe. They don’t suffer much there, perhaps, but they don’t quite make contact here either. And many natural performers are comfortable only within a certain frame. It is always interesting, for instance, to see a famous actor wracked by fear while accepting an Academy Award. Simply being oneself before an audience can be terrifying even for those who perform for a living.
Needless to say, I am not a born performer. Nor am I naturally comfortable standing in front of a group of friends or strangers to deliver a message. However, I have always been someone who had things he wanted to say. This marriage of fear and desire is an unhappy one—and many people are stuck in it.
At the end of my senior year in high school, I learned that I was to be the class valedictorian. I declined the honor. And I managed to get into my thirties without directly confronting my fear of public speaking. At the age of thirty-three, I enrolled in graduate school, where I gave a few scientific presentations while lurking in the shadows of PowerPoint. Still, it seemed that I might be able to skirt my problem with a little luck—until I began to feel as though a large pit had opened in the center of my life, and I was circling the edge. It was becoming professionally and psychologically impossible to turn away.
The reckoning finally came when I published my first book, The End of Faith. Suddenly, I was thirty-seven and faced with the prospect of a book tour. I briefly considered avoiding all public appearances and becoming a man of mystery. Had I done so, I would still be fairly mysterious, and you probably wouldn’t be reading these words.
I cannot personally attest to most forms of self-overcoming: I don’t know what it is like to recover from addiction, lose a hundred pounds, or fight in a war. I can say from experience, however, that it is possible to change one’s relationship to public speaking.
And the process need not take long. In fact, I have spoken publicly no more than fifty times in my life, and many of my earliest appearances were for fairly high stakes, being either televised, or against opponents who would have dearly loved to see me fail, or both. Given where I started, I believe that almost anyone can transcend a fear of the podium. (Whether he has something interesting to say is another matter, of course—one that he would do well to sort out before attracting a crowd.)
If you have been avoiding public speaking, I hope you find the following points helpful:
1. Admit that you have a problem
No one is likely to drag you in front of a crowd and force you to produce audible sentences. Thus, you can probably avoid speaking in public for the rest of your life. Even if you are one day put on trial for murder, you can refuse to testify in your own defense. If your mother dies and your father asks that you say a few words at the funeral, you can always retreat into your grief. Bill Clinton didn’t speak at his mother’s funeral, and he is famously at ease in front of a crowd. Everyone already knows that you loved your mother. So, yes, you can probably keep silent until you get safely into a grave of your own.
But the fear will periodically make you miserable, and it will limit your opportunities in life. Thomas Jefferson aside, the people who currently run the world were first willing to run a meeting, deliver a speech, or debate opponents in a public forum. You might feel that you haven’t paid much of a price for avoiding the crowd, but you don’t know what your life would be like if you had become a competent public speaker. If you are in college, or just beginning your career, or even somewhere near its middle, it is time to overcome your fear.
But the fear will periodically make you miserable, and it will limit your opportunities in life. Thomas Jefferson aside, the people who currently run the world were first willing to run a meeting, deliver a speech, or debate opponents in a public forum. You might feel that you haven’t paid much of a price for avoiding the crowd, but you don’t know what your life would be like if you had become a competent public speaker. If you are in college, or just beginning your career, or even somewhere near its middle, it is time to overcome your fear.
by Sam Harris | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Prospects For Left-Wing Populism
An easy way to distinguish a populist appeal from a technocratic one is that the populist message will restrict itself entirely to primary representations. For example, the “cost of living” is not a primary representation, it is an abstract concept. The price of groceries, on the other hand, is a primary representation – everyone can easily summon up an image of the price, on the supermarket shelf, the last time they bought orange juice or bread. This is, of course, something that Trump spent a great deal of time talking about (“groceries, such a simple word”), and that the Brahmin left in America spent a great deal of time making fun of him for (e.g. here). In so doing, they exhibited a sort of higher-order stupidity. As Stanovich observes, the thing about primary representations is that they have a “special salience” that abstract concepts will never possess. (...)
From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.) The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.
In order to do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about, they must also by-and-large accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, it is extremely difficult to find issues on which left-wing politicians can be authentically populist.
In order to do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about, they must also by-and-large accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, it is extremely difficult to find issues on which left-wing politicians can be authentically populist.
by Joeseph Heath, In Due Course | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Sounds about right. See also: Why We Never Hear About the Countries Where Socialism Works (Amie Boakye).]
When most people hear the word socialism, the first images that flash across their minds are grim ones: long bread lines in the Soviet Union, economic collapse in Venezuela, or repression in Cuba. In popular Western discourse, socialism has been painted as synonymous with failure, inefficiency, and authoritarianism. The narrative is so ingrained that even those who’ve never studied political theory or looked closely at history reflexively think socialism equals poverty.
But here’s the paradox: many countries around the world have quietly, effectively integrated socialist principles into their political and economic systems. And they are thriving. These nations often rank among the happiest, healthiest, and most educated societies on Earth. So why don’t we hear about them? Why do their successes stay in the shadows while the failures dominate headlines?
The short answer: power, perception, and politics.
Before diving into examples, it’s important to define what socialism means in practice, because the word itself has become a linguistic battlefield. For some, socialism means full state control over production and distribution. For others, it’s a mixed economy where public services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure are guaranteed, while markets handle the rest.
In reality, modern socialism often looks less like Soviet central planning and more like a robust safety net combined with democratic governance. It’s universal healthcare in Sweden, tuition-free universities in Finland, and public housing in Vienna. It’s not the abolition of markets, but the idea that essential services should be protected from market failure.
That distinction matters. Because much of the West’s fear-mongering about socialism rests on outdated caricatures.
When most people hear the word socialism, the first images that flash across their minds are grim ones: long bread lines in the Soviet Union, economic collapse in Venezuela, or repression in Cuba. In popular Western discourse, socialism has been painted as synonymous with failure, inefficiency, and authoritarianism. The narrative is so ingrained that even those who’ve never studied political theory or looked closely at history reflexively think socialism equals poverty.
But here’s the paradox: many countries around the world have quietly, effectively integrated socialist principles into their political and economic systems. And they are thriving. These nations often rank among the happiest, healthiest, and most educated societies on Earth. So why don’t we hear about them? Why do their successes stay in the shadows while the failures dominate headlines?
The short answer: power, perception, and politics.
Before diving into examples, it’s important to define what socialism means in practice, because the word itself has become a linguistic battlefield. For some, socialism means full state control over production and distribution. For others, it’s a mixed economy where public services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure are guaranteed, while markets handle the rest.
In reality, modern socialism often looks less like Soviet central planning and more like a robust safety net combined with democratic governance. It’s universal healthcare in Sweden, tuition-free universities in Finland, and public housing in Vienna. It’s not the abolition of markets, but the idea that essential services should be protected from market failure.
That distinction matters. Because much of the West’s fear-mongering about socialism rests on outdated caricatures.
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