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The Intrepid

Field Guide to Scratching Less™

The calamine lotion for those myth-driven itches When Your Wallet Itches But Your Brain Knows Better So you've read about Fear of Mything Out, nodded along with the analysis of how tools become identity proxies, and recognized yourself in the anxiety of the gun counter, boot store, or

Erica Chenoweth and the Working Girls

Impossible Dreams of the 3.5% Cargo Cult Part One: I was here The livestream buffered. Ten people holding handmade signs outside a shuttered municipal building, their chants barely audible against the hum of traffic. An overhead drone shot caught the stillness just before the feed cut out. By the

FOMO: Fear of Mything Out

Why your boots, your pistol, and your AI workflow all whisper the same story I. The Anxiety of the Counter At the gun shop, the script writes itself: "Everyone else has a 'real' 1911, and I'm stuck with this polymer striker-fired thing." "Am

Electric Eden Meets The Lost Folk

Well, what have we here? We made a joke, of course. That's what Electric Eden was — and still is — a sharpened stick whittled into a kind of prank, poking at the ambered reliquary of British folk tradition. We wrote a rules-light machine for breaking songs because we wanted

Catspaw, Terrier, Squirrel, Spy: The Machine Towers Over All

A Designer's Essay on Espionage, Subversion, and Play Espionage games usually begin with a lie: you are the protagonist of your story. Players expect agency, meaningful choices, and the power to shape outcomes through clever thinking and decisive action. But the history of intelligence work has always been

The Outward Helix

On Trent Reznor and the Art of Aging Forward There's a meme floating around that captures Trent Reznor's evolution in four panels: high school band nerd clutching a trumpet, skeletal scarecrow in his Downward Spiral years, buff and ripped "GNC Valued Customer" in his

It's Just Wednesday (And Working As Intended)

In Portland, a man leaves the central library on a Tuesday evening, sees a disturbance, intervenes, and gets stabbed by teenagers with skateboards. In Memphis, violent crime drops 16% year-over-year, but residents still wake in cold sweats about grocery store closures. In Gateway, twenty-five years and $88 million in urban

The Canary and the Breeze

Notes on Entrapment, Happiness, and the Art of Staying Human Introduction Finland tops the World Happiness Report year after year, a statistical triumph that feels increasingly surreal when you learn that roughly half a million Finns—nearly 10% of the adult population—are trapped in a debt enforcement system that

TiGGR: Seveneves - Lives in the Ring

Despite most of its action happening on the terraformed New Earth, the third arc of Seveneves provides a wealth of information on the Ring, the contiguous band of orbital habitats that circle humanity's birth world. A microcosmic diorama reminiscent of the Balkanized Cold War, the Ring is segmented

The Bubble, the Breakfast, and the Billionaires

Ted Gioia made his AI bubble essay free to all readers this week, and the timing feels almost cinematic. Markets have been on a jittery seesaw, NVIDIA's chart looks less like a rocket and more like a stalled elevator, and even Sam Altman is whispering "bubble"