Joshua Rothman

We fight our nervous energy—but maybe we misunderstand what it’s telling us.

The jobs apocalypse hasn’t arrived. Something else is happening instead.

After industry-wide calls for regulation, what’s concerning isn’t that the problems are real. It’s that there are no guaranteed solutions.

In the wake of turmoil at OpenAI and Anthropic, it’s become common to describe A.I. as a kind of person, hatching plans and pursuing desires. The truth is a little trickier.

We blame smartphones—but the problem might be us.

We’d be happier, perhaps, if we found meaning not through abstractions but through the physical things around us.

If the world seems to waste our time, it’s partly because we view time itself as a resource to be extracted and optimized.

Like humans, the technology will never be perfect. The question is what imperfections we’re willing to tolerate.

Discrimination against the unattractive is widespread—and widely tolerated.