Why Economic Growth is Like Mona Lisa
Duncan J. Watts, former principal research scientist at Yahoo! and a physicist-turned-sociologist, distrusts the way most people form their explanations of the world. “Why is Mona Lisa the most famous...
View ArticleWhy Our World Started in 1979
Christian Caryl, the editor of Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab, has a new book that discusses the pivotal role events of the year 1979 played in shaping modern history (my earlier review is here). In...
View ArticleCatastrophic Social Change
The fabric of human society is an ever changing probabilistic system of constantly diffusing innovations, altering its face at variable magnitudes. It has ever been so, though the amount and degree of...
View ArticleThe Problem with High-Level Principles
Internet governance is a hot issue in international politics. Following failed telecommunications treaty negotiations at the ITU last December, many governments are still searching for a way to have...
View ArticleBitcoin Is Great, But It Won’t Fix Our Monkey Brains
Bitcoin is now generally understood to be A Thing, and a particularly exciting one at that. Once-fashionable skepticism for its own sake is quickly becoming less click-worthy than this gripping...
View Article
