Why Brooks Needs Runners Who Hate to Run
The $500 million company has conquered runners. Now it has to figure out everyone else.
Good vs. Better at Bad
I try to leave out the hot takes, but this was worth including for its macro view of what the “smart” assistant space should be. We’re still a ways off.
Wake me up when Alexa can do anything remotely this complex, and I’ll start to worry about Apple “falling behind” in this space.
Also, the footnotes are priceless.
In the Footsteps of Robert Moses
I got to meet Robert Moses at his best, using his hard-earned power to carve out large parts of Long Island to hand it off to millions of New Yorkers to enjoy forever. And I got to see Moses at his worst, evicting tens of thousands of impoverished families just to build one more expressway through a street, a neighborhood, a city whose need for more roads was never a necessity — just an exaggerated, self-fulfilling illusion.
Don’t Let Your (Technology) Tools Use You
We’re becoming sucked into the various technology tools that are supposed to enable our productivity. The only thing we’re really doing is losing time.
The Dying Art of Disagreement
So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right.
America Wasn’t Built for Humans
Tribalism was an urge our Founding Fathers assumed we could overcome. And so it has become our greatest vulnerability.
Nothing to hide
Privacy seems more and more like either a luxury for the few, or something that people just don’t care enough about.