“I keep coming back to Cartier-Bresson and his paradoxical ethos of a technical prowess that cares not for technique. ‘People think far too much about technique,’ he says in one of his famous aphorisms, “and not enough about seeing.’” “Consider what happens when you take a picture—I mean, what is going on inside you, the… Continue reading

“It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.” “Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers,… Continue reading

“You have to be able to feel where the edge is in particular training sessions, to have a sense of pace from the catch of your breath and the weight of your legs, and you have to be able to be attentive to the background fatigue that is the constant companion of any athlete.” “‘You… Continue reading

“The thing is our physiology is really smart. I mean, it’s just really smart. It’s very hard to trick your physiology. We live in a 3D world, we move in a 3D world. So if we make mistakes in our movement, we die. So we have much higher standards in our physiology than we do… Continue reading

“Every good artist is an outsider artist, in a way that counts; and every good critic is an outsider critic, in a way that counts. Good art and good criticism are not ‘practices’—that horrible word, so prevalent in art babble lately. Practices are professional specialties. Associated with art, the word assumes settled social agreements on… Continue reading

“The legitimacy of any system always depends on performance. In the end, people will cease to trust a system that does not work for them.” “The rise of demagogic nationalism and authoritarianism in high-income democracies—the core of today’s political crisis—can be attributed in significant part to…economic failures. The problem is not just the economic failures… Continue reading