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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.
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The Forever War
For many returning from war, they might as well be returning to another planet.
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The Three Languages of Politics
The language we use to talk about politics works unconsciously to make up our minds for us.
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A History of the Future in 100 Objects
The future will be a lot like the present, only more.
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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.
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The Overview Effect
A literal new perspective can lead us to a figurative one.
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28
On the occasion of my 28th birthday.
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Navigating Stuckness
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
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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.
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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.
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The Left Hand of Darkness
You can learn a lot from what makes you uncomfortable, if you can just get over that discomfort.
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Invisible Cities
A collection of fantastical descriptions of imaginary cities can nonetheless tell us the truth about ourselves.
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The Shock Doctrine
The most nefarious looters in the aftermath of a disaster are sometimes the policymakers responding to it.
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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.
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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.
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Rats and Cages
Circumstance bears heavily on behavior.
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Black Mirror
Does technology amplify the ugliest aspects of humanity, or merely reveal them?
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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
The future might be dramatically different from the present while still recognizably the same.
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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Our emotional lives, especially the sad parts, are far richer than language has equipped us to describe.
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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.