Productivity
Story Stream
Slowing It Down October 24, 2024
“Are you a control freak?” Author Cal Newport paused after reading the inquiry from a listener during an episode of his podcast, Deep Questions. The subtle smackdown that ensued hinted at a history of receiving similar criticisms, and Newport did not...
Why Randy Newman Is Least Loved For His Best Work October 24, 2024
The singer, songwriter, and composer Randy Newman had a fascination with the legend of Faust that approached obsession. Beginning around 1981, he worked for some 15 years on an original retelling of the much-retold story of spiritual brokerage. In hi...
Stop Blaming Foucault October 23, 2024
My doctoral adviser was a brilliant and intimidating scholar. Stern but often playful and mischievous, he emphasized an open-ended curiosity about the strangeness of our world. He was also a radical social constructivist who believed our academic mis...
The New Burnout Generation October 18, 2024
In high school, Jayden Dial worked on a podcast, planned school events, and made a film. That was on top of doing her homework and applying to college. But sometimes, she still felt like she wasn’t doing enough.Jayden, now 18, would see kids her age ...
Escaping the Mind Machine October 17, 2024
In 1714, the German polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, wrote in The Monadology, “If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could ente...
It's Time To End Normal Trade Relations With China October 15, 2024
After more than 20 years of so-called "normal" trade relations between the United States and China, the consensus on the desirability of that trade relationship has shifted dramatically—and for good reason. After China received Permanent Normal Trade...
God Bless the Misfits October 10, 2024
Both those who oppose populism and those who look at it with favor seem to broadly agree that populism is engendered by rapid and deep changes in a society. One way or another, change is supposed to trigger a sense of insecurity. This is the common g...
The Flat Provocations of “Joker: Folie à Deux” October 07, 2024
At least the first “Joker” movie, Todd Phillips’s 2019 origin story of the Gotham villain as antihero, had the bravado to take its protagonist’s revolt to noxious extremes. The abused, neglected, and damaged Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix)—accursed as...
Heal Thyself October 03, 2024
Recent calls to “Make America Healthy Again” are a welcome message at a time of mass food production, rising heart disease and various forms of cancer, and generally sedentary lives. A recent episode of Tucker Carlson’s podcast focused on the current...
Why Jacob Elordi Is Heathcliff October 02, 2024
Not many films are panned even before they’ve gone into production. Such has been the fate, though, of yet another version of Wuthering Heights. Already derided as melodramatic trash, some reviewers are wondering whether the director, Emerald Fennell...
The Cult of Self-Optimization August 06, 2024
If I were to put into practice just a tiny amount of the content I’ve recently viewed on social media, I would, immediately on awakening, make sure I rehydrate with water. The bottle would be steel or glass to minimise the absorption of harmful micro...
Literary Blockbuster August 02, 2024
The comedic set-up could be a movie. One day a beloved Hollywood megastar e-mails an eccentric British writer seeking to collaborate on a tie-in novel based on an ultraviolent comic book.The exuberant A-lister envelops the mild-mannered, high-minded ...
A Veteran Teacher’s Audacious Plan for Staving Off American Decline June 03, 2024
The following essay is adapted from the recently released book LESSONS IN LIBERTY: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans (HarperCollins) by Jeremy S. Adams Decades and centuries in the future, historians will look back at our pecu...
Another Productivity Hack? June 03, 2024
Everyone wants to get things done, but it can be hard to predict how long they’ll take. Mathematicians needed three centuries to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem—first proposed around 1637, the solution only came in 1994. Was that remarkably fast, or path...
