Two recent stories about Silicon Valley are hard to read without wondering if everyone involved has lost their mind. Once a place that celebrated the crazy ones, the misfits and rebels who saw things differently, it now seems to have found a new kind of crazy that isn t born of rebellion but fear of falling behind. Everyone is chasing the person ahead of them, with little time to remember where…
I have a great deal of respect for DHH, and I agree with the premise behind his recent list : Europe is in trouble and it needs to become much more capable of building. We are aging, we are economically fragmented, and we are losing too many of the people who are willing to take risks. The question is not whether there is a problem. Beyond that do, I squarely disagree with his diagnosis of the…
There are many reasons not to have children. Simply not wanting them is enough. But there is a framing I struggle with: that choosing not to have children is an act of mercy, sparing those hypothetical children from suffering in the world we are creating. I reject that framing because it turns pessimism into moral virtue by inventing a beneficiary. A hypothetical child is not waiting in…
The Donauinsel , Vienna s Danube Island is a long artificial island, a piece of flood protection that also became a place for recreation. People bike there, swim there, walk there, have a drink there. If you live in Vienna for long enough, you probably think you know it. But then go there by bike at night and cycle slowly the entire length of it, with the intent to absorb and look, and suddenly…
It was only three months ago when I did my first post here titled War . Things have only gotten worse. After the US and Israel started bombing Iran on the 28th of February, new red lines were crossed. There is no clear justification for that war, and no serious attempt has been made to provide one. What followed escalated within a week beyond those borders. The UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain were targeted…
Ukraine faces one of the harshest winters in recent memory while Russia steps up its attacks on civilian energy infrastructure. There was a time we would have condemned a direct war on civilian infrastructure as a war crime. Now it barely makes the news. January 2026 217 strikes on energy infrastructure 9 waves of coordinated strikes on energy infrastructure 4,000 drones launched 350 missiles…
This post has no point. Silicon Valley loves a success story and America celebrates the winner. In podcasts and blog posts, founders tell us how they made it. Luck and starting circumstances are footnotes at best, except for when they can be used to emphasize the story. The message is clear: I made it, so can you. This belief does something to a person. If success is earned, then failure must be…
Legal immigration is a fugazi . The most legal form of immigration over the last half century has been people who were granted asylum. That s because unlike most other forms of immigration, being a refugee has been protected under international law. It s part of article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948: Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum…
There won t be any [special military] operations if you treat us with respect, if you respect our interests just as we ve always tried to respect yours. — Vladimir Putin, December 2025 I have been thinking a lot about forgiveness. The kind of forgiveness that we would need to de-escalate the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How do you move on without lying to yourself? How do you insist on…
Yesterday evening, at the closing of the gates of Hamburg, where in fair weather several thousand persons had been shut out, a tumult arose. The populace hurled stones at the Dutch troops on guard, who at first fired blindly, and then with aimed shots, whereby some persons were killed and several others wounded. — The demand made upon the city of Hamburg in the past autumn, that it should…