The Second Life of Things
A new thing is at its most expensive at the moment it stops being new. After the first unboxing, the first trip or the first scratch, a large part of…
People on Autopilot
Most everyday behaviour is automatic. People repeat familiar phrases, ask questions without being ready to hear the answer, and defend an opinion that formed before the arguments did. This does…
Sex and Mismatched Desire
Sex is the biggest nothing of all time. — Andy Warhol Long relationships rarely argue about whether sex is needed at all. The argument usually starts with the calendar. One…
Swimming in water
Educational culture sometimes behaves as if it were enough to read the right book and understand the right formula. Knowledge really can be got from a text; skill appears only…
The Invisible Shore
The hardest thing to take into account is not what we do not know but what we do not suspect exists. A person sees the boundary of his own knowledge…
Plan B does not invite disaster
Superstitious common sense sometimes treats preparing for a bad scenario as a sign of distrust or a way to “tempt fate”. A backup, a first aid kit and a second…