1. The Epic of Gilgamesh

    A lot has changed since humans first settled down, but some basic things about who and what we are have not.

  2. The Forever War

    For many returning from war, they might as well be returning to another planet.

  3. The Three Languages of Politics

    The language we use to talk about politics works unconsciously to make up our minds for us.

  4. A History of the Future in 100 Objects

    The future will be a lot like the present, only more.

  5. Throne of the Crescent Moon

    Good fiction can transport you from your own time and place; better fiction can dislodge you from your own culture, as well.

  6. The Overview Effect

    A literal new perspective can lead us to a figurative one.

  7. 28

    On the occasion of my 28th birthday.

  8. Navigating Stuckness

    “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

  9. The Politics of Worry

    In debates over whether or not we should have the freedom to choose something, we suffer from forgetting that there's a third option: the freedom from having to choose.

  10. The House I Live In

    When a system persists despite repeated failure at its stated purpose, look at what it actually succeeds in doing to understand why it's allowed to endure.

  11. The Left Hand of Darkness

    You can learn a lot from what makes you uncomfortable, if you can just get over that discomfort.

  12. Invisible Cities

    A collection of fantastical descriptions of imaginary cities can nonetheless tell us the truth about ourselves.

  13. The Shock Doctrine

    The most nefarious looters in the aftermath of a disaster are sometimes the policymakers responding to it.

  14. A Confluence of Desires

    Simply making a list of the things you’d like to change about your life can be remarkably cathartic and show you some patterns to make achieving them less daunting.

  15. Resiliency, Risk, and a Good Compass: Tools for the Coming Chaos

    As new technologies disrupt old orders, we as a society may find it useful to adopt some of the agile methodologies from the tech start-up world. But this can't mean that we let people fail the way most start-ups do.

  16. Rats and Cages

    Circumstance bears heavily on behavior.

  17. Black Mirror

    Does technology amplify the ugliest aspects of humanity, or merely reveal them?

  18. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

    The future might be dramatically different from the present while still recognizably the same.

  19. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

    Our emotional lives, especially the sad parts, are far richer than language has equipped us to describe.

  20. Stalker

    We might so want to live in a just world, a world in which bad things never happen to good people, that we try to blame those good people (even when it's ourselves) for the bad things that happen to them.

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