Tag: culture
Why Does Conor McGregor Get a Comeback?
Conor McGregor returns to headline UFC 329 tonight after being found liable for rape in civil court, a comeback made possible by the UFC's right-wing politicization and the broader 'Epstein class' culture of impunity for powerful men. On the normalization of sexual violence, Dana White's friendship with Trump, and how public awareness fails to disrupt the status quo.
Why Does Conor McGregor Get a Comeback?
Conor McGregor returns to headline UFC 329 tonight after being found liable for rape in civil court, a comeback made possible by the UFC's right-wing politicization and the broader 'Epstein class' culture of impunity for powerful men. On the normalization of sexual violence, Dana White's friendship with Trump, and how public awareness fails to disrupt the status quo.
Why Does Conor McGregor Get a Comeback?
Conor McGregor returns to headline UFC 329 tonight after being found liable for rape in civil court, a comeback made possible by the UFC's right-wing politicization and the broader 'Epstein class' culture of impunity for powerful men. On the normalization of sexual violence, Dana White's friendship with Trump, and how public awareness fails to disrupt the status quo.
Poptimus Prime
Freddie deBoer writes about how poptimism has achieved so much success because of the cultural context in which it was born. A culture that considers it wrong to have standards that can identify one thing as better than another is fertile ground for the elevation of terrible art. That’s why we have record reviews that...
Why Tagalog and Filipino Are Two Distinct Languages
Debunking, once and for all, the myth that Tagalog and Filipino languages are one and the same.
Strangers and Intimates
The fascinating story of how private life was won, and how it might just as easily be lost... Private life is in mortal danger, following decades in which it has been relinquished and ransacked. It is threatened by a three-headed state and corporate surveillance, a confessional, 'tell-all' culture that makes people complicit in the invasion of their own privacy, and the intense politicization of private life. Tiffany Jenkins's groundbreaking book traces the emergence of private sanctuaries from authority and public opinion to show that private life is a very recent – and hard-won – achievement. It also warns that, if we're not careful, it will be a temporary one. Strangers and Intimates is animated by dramatic human from the political struggles in the seventeenth century that led to Edmund Coke's rallying cry that 'an Englishman's home is his castle'; to the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini; and from the embrace by the public of reality TV to the Chinese government's social credit system. A private life is a precious, sustaining resource that is of profound intrinsic value, and it must be defended. We won't know what we have lost until it has gone...
Québec, la nation
Deux textes qui se répondent, datés de 1962. Celui de Pierre Elliott Trudeau, dans Cité Libre : La nouvelle trahison des clercs et celui y répondant, de Hubert Aquin : La fatigue culturelle du Canada français publié dans la revue Liberté. Références tirées de ce billet bien senti de Steve Proulx, Lettre à Paul, sur...
If you won't carry the pager, maybe don't push to mainline
Drive-by AI changes break the shared model a team builds around its code, and the ICs end up cleaning up the mess. Why pushing to mainline should come with the pager.
When Agents Encounter Culture
In April 2026, Andon Labs gave a Gemini 3.1 Pro agent named Mona $21,000 and told it to open a café in Stockholm. What happened next is mostly told as comedy: 120 eggs with no stove, 6,000 napkins, 3,000 disposable gloves, a police permit application with an AI-generated sketch of a street it had never visited.
Star Wars The Product
What Star Wars owes to its fans and commercial interests.
BRIDGES ARE SOCIALISM
The great MetLife Stadium walking debate, why a bridge is not about crossing a road, but because bridges are socialism.
Understand the Culture & Context
An advice for foreigners visiting the Philippines or when interacting with Filipinos online
Being AI-native matters more than experience
In Q2 2026, our Ops & Finance team caved and said what we'd been thinking for a while: when it comes to hiring, AI-native beats experience. Not "experienced person who uses AI." Not "senior hire with AI on the JDs as a nice-to-have." AI-native…
What We Lose with Cultural Extinction: The Red Thread Cut
In 1995, China abducted six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima—the recognized 11th Panchen Lama—severing the chain of mutual recognition at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist succession. Meanwhile, Michif, a language born from Cree verbs and French nouns that belonged to no one but the Métis People, has nearly vanished within living memory. Both losses are the same act: colonialism's weaponization of continuity. On the extinction of languages, the cutting of red threads, and what it means to inherit a chain with links already missing.
Why attacking your competitors online is dumb
Let's say a competitor copies your feature. They lift your positioning, write a misleading comparison post, or just take a cheap shot at you on X. And let's say you're 'right' – they actually did the thing, and it's actually annoying. Still don't do…
XOXO Explore is fitting showcase for a brilliant experiment
XOXO was completely wonderful. This site is a lovely showcase of why.
A THOUSAND CRANES: Why I Write Every Day
My daily writing is a practice of releasing messages in bottles and folding paper cranes—from Montaigne in his tower and Johnson writing in poverty, to Sadako Sasaki folding 1,450 cranes in a hospital ward. What the essayists, drift bottles, and Senbazuru share, and why the attempt itself is the whole math.
The Foresyte Saga
My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation of The Forsyte Saga that aired early in the aughts and starred Damien Lewis, among others. The generation spanning historical drama scratched my itch for vast and ambitious period pieces. Last night, we watched the first episode of Masterpiece’s The Count of Monte Christo, hoping it would...
Transitioning to a Sacred Culture
I've been fascinated with the transition from a Profane culture to a Sacred one for a long time. In 2008 (senior year in college), my final project for the course Religion in Culture was a video essay on the mashup artist Girl Talk. I analyzed his live shows through the lens of sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Victor Turner, and the concepts of Collective Effervescence and Communitas.
The Great Sorting in Silicon Valley
The moral reckoning that came for the structural rot in Hollywood, Music, and Politics has finally triggered the Great Sorting in Silicon Valley. The era of Extractive Performance is expiring: vanity signals (TechCrunch, billboards, sauna invites), 'growth at any human cost', the 'move fast and break things' excuse for moral bankruptcy. It's all done. Builder, Rabbit, Humane, Pickle, Delve, others. These aren't accidents or outliers; they're symptoms of a paradigm where VCs monetize Credentialin...
The Novel Cure
Image by My Mom is Wolves via Flickr Every time I finish a novel in which I have invested a lot of time and emotion, I feel a bit unmoored. What other worlds are out there now that this one is gone? It’s like the characters in that world died and will be grieved. Some...
Building an Organizational Collective Consciousness
This reads to me as the building of an organizational collective consciousness. The AI world model + intelligence layer reduces unnecessary friction that allows humans to focus on human things. This effectively collapses the hierarchy into 3 roles: owners, doers, and coaches. Jack gives historical examples of armies and organizations in industrial times. These are examples of efficiency and control in large, worldly systems.
STORYTELLING Part Two: The (Literal) Magic of Writing
Grammar/Glamour/Grimoire. 言霊 & heka. Spelling & spellcasting. The Word. Writing is generative, not descriptive. Cultures across millennia have understood that words conjure reality. Writing conjures, symbols activate the brain, serving as telepathy across distance and time.
THE INEFFICIENCY OF DISHONESTY
Why content without effort feels like dishonesty, and why human messiness might matter more than ever online.