Let’s build an Overground Railroad instead — I overhead a couple of high school students this morning talking about their college options. “I don’t think I’m going to apply to Grinnel, anymore,” one said. “Or Rice,” the other chimed in. “Screw them.” They were looking at the map of US states that are either implementing or likely…

How Speculators Prevent Crypto from Working as a Safe Haven — One of the most common questions I’ve been getting this week is from young investors (they wouldn’t call themselves investors, but they are) wondering why their crypto holdings are going down as fast or faster than the stock market. “But I bought all this Ethereum because I knew the market…

Higher prices are not necessarily a bad thing. — Yes, gas prices are up. I saw a woman fill up her old station wagon with premium the other day, and her pump total went over $90. “Ouch!” I said to her, smiling. “This damn inflation will be the end of us all,” she replied, then added “Let’s go Brandon,”…

Too much artifice is a symptom of something wrong — I don’t like nice interfaces. I never have. I always found technologies easier to use when they don’t try to humanize themselves for me. Worse, when they do try to make themselves softer and squishier and “easier” for humans, I get concerned about losing touch with what they’re really doing…

When middle school bullies rule the world — I found myself actually bothered by Elon Musk’s tweets today. For the most part, I’ve ignored him the same way I ignore most of what happens on that platform. I check out my own highly curated list of users for links to interesting articles I may have missed, and try…

The coming crypto crash may take down more than the tokens, but this is actually good for the blockchain — Retail crypto investors, already reeling from recent losses, were additionally shocked this week to learn that should Coinbase or one of the other exchanges go bankrupt, the assets in their accounts may not be safe. In a worst-case scenario, investors who keep their tokens at Coinbase would have to line…

No hot takes. Just take action. — Sometimes it’s hard to write into the news cycle. I don’t like to write hot takes on things, no matter how closely related they may be to my areas of expertise. I didn’t even write about Elon Musk’s proposed purchase of Twitter because, well, I don’t really care. Not when…

Psychedelics, like everything else, are political — I was a member of the psychedelic counterculture in the 1980s when pretty much every mind-expanding substance was illegal. For us, that illegality was just an obstacle. …

Ten years ago, I realized media literacy meant something different As media theorist John Culkin first observed, we shape our technologies at the moment of their conception, but from that point forward they shape us. We humans designed the telephone, but from then on the telephone influenced how we communicated…