I’m happy to report that this year we welcomed a new little girl into the world, which led me to take a break from writing here. My goal for 2026 is to get back to writing in a more regular cadence, and I have a roadmap of what I want to cover, but more on that later.

Today, my goal is to write my annual year-end reading recap. I’ll give the list below, along with some annotations along the way.

If you only pick three books from my list for next year, here’s what I would suggest:

1. How to Think by Alan Jacobs

2. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

3. Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Here’s my full list:

1. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss — This is one of those business books that people have been telling me about for years. I really appreciated the practical steps in negotiation that it gave. The labeling technique he talks about — using descriptions to disarm people — has been particularly useful.

2. The Grim Years by John J. Navin — This is a history of the settling of the South Carolina Lowcountry in the late 1600s, and as the name implies, it wasn’t a great time to be there.

3. How to Think by Alan Jacobs — Alan Jacobs has been one of my favorite public thinkers for a few years running, and his little book here about thinking was no exception. Recognizing that there is no thinking for yourself in that we are all social creatures is one of many takeaways I have from this one.

4. Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray — This was a pretty technical overview of land planning and zoning from a planner who believes we should abolish zoning. As someone who has followed these topics for a few years, I was skeptical, but I came out of this read thinking, ya know, maybe we should just throw the whole process out.

5. A Short History of Greenville by Judith T. Bainbridge — This was a very approachable history of Greenville, SC. I’ve been on a local history kick since last year, and as a practitioner of local politics, I think the politics of a place should be locally rooted — so having more context about what has come before here is important.

6. The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis — This was a history of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose collective work on cognitive psychology and science changed many of the ways we think about thinking. Great background on how that research came about.

7. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli — This was a beautifully written meditation on the nature of reality from a scientific perspective. It also helped that Benedict Cumberbatch was the narrator of that audiobook version I listened to.

8. Zero to One by Peter Thiel — This brief reflection on how progress happens and the work to go from nothing to something was great as a look into the psychology of one of the most important thinkers of our time. See also where Peter Thiel hesitates for a really long time when asked if the human race should survive.

9. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis — Reading this book came out of reading The Year of Our Lord 1943, mainly because the work of Lewis in this book is such a clear distillation of the battle for the soul of the West that the thinkers of that time believed they were engaged in.

10. The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien — The end of the series, which I started in 2024. What struck me in this one was the parallels between the way Tolkien concludes the War of the Ring and the ushering in of the end state of the World, and how slow and methodical it was. I don’t know if there’s something there about Tolkien’s views of our own world’s end, but it struck me.

11. The Year of Our Lord 1943 by Alan Jacobs — This was one of my favorite reads of the year, but also probably the one that someday I will need to go back through to catch the 80% of this book that went over my head. Jacobs is soaking in context about the rise of technocracy and what it does to our souls that is still as relevant in 2025 (and 2026!) as it was in 1943.

12. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins — I’m a sucker for the Hunger Games books. As someone from East Tennessee who currently lives in the Upstate, the Appalachian echoes in Collins’s world have always been compelling to me. The idea of District 12 and that type of world keeps pulling me back.

13. Challenger by Adam Higginbotham — This was a history of the Challenger shuttle disaster, and everything that went wrong along the way to make that happen. The big lesson is the way super complicated systems will fail. They will. It’s just a matter of whether we put in the right safeguards to stop those failures from cascading.

14. Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum — This was one of my favorite reads of the year. Appelbaum tells such a compelling story of the importance of people being able to move around. The information alone, contrasting the way towns were run in Virginia vs. New England, was helpful without any other commentary.

15. The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen — Rosen walks through several different activities in life and how the digitization of the processes (handwritten letters to keyboards, for example) has changed the nature of the work we are doing when we stop using our hands to write.

16. Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green — I’ve been a big fan of John Green for years, so I honestly just read it because he wrote it. His reflections on the world feel truly genuine and kind, and this book was as thoughtful as ever about a disease that I honestly have thought very little about in my life. This book goes a long way at explaining why.

17. Revelation by G.K. Beale — Our church did a long study of Revelation that brought this one out, since it was the recommended companion commentary.

18. The Narnian by Alan Jacobs — After the intellectual haul that was Jacobs’s 1943 book, this one was a much more colorful picture of the life of one of the greatest thinkers about faith of our time.

19. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel — This one was a bit of a deep dive into a subject I’ve not spent much time thinking about, but Postrel’s origins here in Greenville, SC along with her interview with Jonah Goldberg on his podcast about a year ago made me want to see a bit more about how she thinks. This was a good introduction to that world.

20. Confessions by Augustine — A classic I finally got to. Reading these classics, it is always interesting how the big thoughts that have redefined the Western world are just so subtly embedded in these works and seem almost unremarkable, unless you consider the time in which they were written. The way Augustine works out the concept of disordered desires — the idea that not everything we want conforms to God’s plan — is a pretty basic idea today in Christianity but was revolutionary at the time.

21. Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic by Nadya Williams — Williams was interviewed about her Cultural Christians book, and both were contrarian explorations from my perspective about some facet of Christianity. Her book here is looking at some throughlines between how the Roman world viewed people instrumentally and how our world does the same, with vastly different moral frameworks.

22. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry — This was one of those classics that someone had loaned to me years back that I finally got around to, and it really hit home. His almost lyrical recounting of the way “the war” and “the economy” slowly ate away at the place Jayber called home was a much-needed reflection for me. The way growth and leverage are painted as these slow marching forces across the landscape is tantalizing to think about.

23. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir — I love Andy Weir’s writing style, ever since I came across The Martian right when he had first published it. His technically accurate sci-fi really sticks with me.

24. Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes by Donald Fairbairn — This was a read inspired by my sister’s recent marriage into a Greek Orthodox family and my complete unfamiliarity with it. I found this extremely helpful, and the whole concept of the Western church as law-based vs. the Eastern church as community-based has stuck with me. The author walking through in almost a diagram fashion how the Western church’s account of creation, the fall, Christ’s work of justification that provided for our sanctification and toward our eventual glorification is transmuted in the Eastern church into something built on very different assumptions was fascinating.

25. Cultural Christians in the Early Church by Nadya Williams — This was the book that inspired the podcast I listened to, and her reflections on how in every age there are essentially people taking the faith “seriously” and others not as seriously is a good reminder that there is truly nothing new under the sun.

26. The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch — Andy Crouch is such a good writer, and this was a very practical way to apply some of Crouch’s other works to a family.

27. My Fundamentalist Education by Christine Rosen — This one was more background reading for me, as I’ve found Christine Rosen to be a public thinker whose work I keep coming back to. Her wrestling with the way her fundamentalist education impacted her faith today was telling — she is clearly a person who is still deeply formed by this Christian and lowercase-c conservative upbringing, but has personally lost the faith because of it.

28. Start with Why by Simon Sinek — I read this one first years ago when it came out, but this was the first book in our reading for the Taylors Fellowship through Taylors TownSquare that I’m facilitating, so a re-read was necessary. This book felt very basic going in, but I do think Sinek’s focus on getting back to the core of ideas was helpful.

29. Superbloom by Nicholas Carr — This was a great read. Carr is one of those writers I’ve known I want to read more of, and this just confirmed it. His reflections on our current cultural state and how media have impacted it à la McLuhan are a great reframe of our current situation. A big focus of the book was the way the internet changes what we think should be private and what should be shared, and then the cost of airing out all our dirty laundry for everyone to read.

30. The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis — This was part of a deliberate Lewis deep-dive year. I intended to keep going into the rest of Narnia, but honestly, there were elements I was specifically interested in because of the other works of Lewis this year. The way the magician in the book exemplifies the technocratic practitioner that I’ve come to view as the boogeyman Lewis was working against was a good companion to those other reads.

31. Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath — This was the second read for the Taylors Fellowship, a re-read of a book I’ve read before. I use their SUCCESs paradigm frequently and it was good to go back to the source.

32. Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam — This one is the next book for the Taylors Fellowship, but I needed to re-read to get the questions to our group members before they read it over December and January. The themes that Putnam is exploring here were vital to our thinking about the current collapse of civic discourse.

33. Difficult Men by Brett Martin — This was a bit of an outlier, but I like reading some random things, what can I say? The narrative around the transformation of the TV and movie worlds that took place during this time was fascinating — the creative risk-taking to revive TV as a place where art could be done, to the point where far more “prestige” TV comes out now than cinema, opposite how it used to be. The reversal there is an interesting cultural phenomenon.

34. The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel — Housel is another of these guys who writes a lot, and I finally got around to reading one of his books. The way he described money was not completely foreign to me, but his practical insight in this one was great. His notion of reducing future regret was a very succinct way to memorialize that big concept.

35. The Pursuit of Happiness by Jeffrey Rosen — This was Rosen’s book, walking through the virtues that make up the historic notion of the pursuit of happiness that the founders were referring to. I think his bigger point is that we take that phrase almost to mean everyone doing what they want, but the founders had more in mind the idea that they wanted to create a world where people could pursue what would ultimately make them happy, which in their minds were the classical virtues. To unpack what that meant, Rosen took one of those virtues at a time and looked at the life of a specific founding father and how that virtue played out in their life. I thought it was a very compelling way to make the case.

36. The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman — I love a good meandering cultural collection of essays, and this book provided a lot of thought-provoking context on the decade when I formed my first memories. Some essays I enjoyed more than others, but as a first draft of history, I thought this one had some interesting reflections.

37. The Demon Under the Microscope by Thomas Hager — I’ve always been fascinated with how when people say things are worse than they used to be, we seem to be forgetting that people used to die of paper cuts. But I had never done any real reading on this subject, so this was a read to color in some details there. The whole situation pre-antibiotic seems terrible. The particular story of Calvin Coolidge’s son getting a blister on his foot and dying in the White House was fascinating — just a few years later and he would have been saved. Some of my interest here was specifically prompted by the great Netflix miniseries “Death by Lightning” which recounts the death of James Garfield and how he was not killed by the bullet but by the doctors using unsanitary methods to try to remove it.

As I mentioned earlier, I hope to be back early next year with some new explorations, but for now, thanks for reading, and see you again soon.

On the timely topic of having kids, I have three of my own and I’ve noticed something you may have too: if you have kids or even a sibling, they’re all quite different, right? Raised in the same home, by the same people, with mainly the same ingredients and environment, it’s likely they turned out worlds apart.

Why is that?

One might say their unique mix of DNA is what separates them, but I think there are other factors at play as well.

Birth Order

You may have seen funny Reels or TikToks about stereotypical kids’ birth order, but I think there’s something to this. If you have an older sibling or a firstborn, more than likely you treated them (or were treated) with caution. Unsure what they were capable of in the beginning, and high expectations to be helpful as they grew up are pretty typical for firstborns. As kids grow, they either lean into this “I am depended upon” or grow weary of it and settle into a “I want to do what I want to do” mindset.

You might be thinking, “Well yes, everyone is aware of that.” But really think about it. If you were born with exact same DNA but in a different order in the lineup or even as an only child, do you think you would be a different person now as an adult?

Core Moments

If you’ve seen Pixar’s, Inside Out, you might be having a mental image of the memory orbs or “islands” of personality. If you haven’t, it might sound like I’m losing my mind. Watch this short clip to get caught up (and also you should go watch the whole movie—it’s great even if you aren’t watching with kids).

Think of something you really enjoy. Now start to trace it back. For me, it’s nature. My dad was a camp director until I was eight years old and I spent my days barefoot in the grass. To me, those were fun memories, things I enjoyed. What about a favorite sports team? I’d imagine you can trace that back to your childhood and memories watching games growing up.

On a more serious note, maybe you grew up in a large family and reading became your escape from the chaos. Where has that led you today? Maybe a teacher or coach made a statement that deeply impacted you—for better or worse—and altered your trajectory or at the very least shaped your personality.

Friend Choice

This last one, I think, as a parent worries me the most. It’s something I can’t necessarily change but something I can impact as they grow. We want our kids to have good friends, right? But how far do we go to affect that? Do we put them in private school so they’re surrounded by what we might consider “the more elite”? Of course the negatives of that, as we’ve gone over in previous Content & Context articles, if we only surround ourselves with like-minded, our minds will never change.

Consider your friends growing up and how they impacted you. What if you’d been zoned for a different school or decided to sit at a different lunch table that first week of school. How might your life be different now?

So why even contemplate all this? It sounds like half is left to the roll of the dice and half seems to be “playing God” if we intervene too much. Where does that leave us?

I think there’s a few key takeaways from all this:

• Have grace on other’s stories. You might know their upbringing or be familiar with their family but we don’t always know what’s going on under the surface.

• Cultivate good in your children (or your friends or even coworkers). If you see something positive in them, help them lean into that. Be that teacher that made an impactful comment. If you see something about them that could have negative affects later, support them however you can safely rather than trying to tell them what to do or not to do.

• Know there’s always time to change. Maybe your upbringing wasn’t the greatest. That cycle doesn’t have to continue. You really can be the change you want to see and all that jazz.

Thanks for listening and back to your regularly scheduled programming.

One thing I’ve thought a lot about over the past year is zoning. Zoning is a system of rules that governs land use in a given area. Originating in the early 20th century, zoning divides cities and towns into districts designated for specific purposes, such as residential, commercial, or industrial use. It also prescribes the density or intensity of those uses in each district. Effectively, zoning is the context that shapes the content of our communities.

Zoning was born out of a desire for stability. When early zoning maps were created, the goal was to set clear expectations for how the land would be used, ensuring a sense of permanence and predictability in community planning. Planners envisioned these maps as static blueprints—once a parcel of land was designated for single-family homes, factories, or commercial buildings, it was assumed that those uses would remain unchanged. It was recognized that the maps might need to be updated occasionally, but the idea was that experts could figure out the right mixes of uses and set us on a great path forward. Effectively, we trade part of the rights to do what we want on our property for the stability of knowing that everyone around us will be constrained and that an unbiased arbitrator will decide what’s appropriate.

This dynamic is rooted in an idea central to the Progressive Era: the belief in the power of the “unbiased expert.” Zoning assumes that a planner can determine the best use for every parcel of land, regardless of the complex, subjective needs of the people who live there.

There’s a core tension here: humans are bad at predicting the future. We are subject to all sorts of biases in our thinking, and while we can employ tools to help us compensate for those biases, they are never perfect. The reality of zoning bears this out. In Greenville County, for example, rezoning is routine, with requests constantly reshaping the map to reflect changing economic and community needs. This dynamic creates even more tension:

• Existing property owners view their zoning as a promise that this is how their community will always be, and many build their lives around that promise.

• Prospective property owners or even existing ones who want to do something different with their property see the reality of the ever-changing zoning map and believe that with appropriate resources and political maneuvering, they can change the zoning to meet their desires.

This intent vs. reality divide leads nowhere pretty, as you can imagine. Those who bought into the promise feel betrayed, and those who have watched the map be changed so frequently in other places don’t understand the fuss.

Zoning makes the promise of stability explicit, but we buy into unspoken promises in other domains frequently:

• We believe our car is working great until the day it goes into the shop.

• We believe jobs are safe and secure until they are not.

• We believe our health can be counted on until one day, it can’t.

These promises, either spoken or unspoken, will eventually come face to face with reality. The question for us is, when faced with these realities, how do we respond? Some contexts will call for a fight, while some will call for us to concede, but regardless, it’s essential to think through what our expectations are ahead of time to ensure they align with the reality we are facing.

If you’re interested in learning more about zoning, there’s a lot of content out there. I’ve recently finished Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray, and I think the way he talks about it is very understandable. He is very much on the “we should abolish all this” side of the argument and doesn’t pretend to be unbiased, but I think he offers one of the best explanations of zoning for a layman I’ve encountered.

With that, thanks for reading, and see you again next time.

Social Image by Antoni Shkraba

Last week, I talked about the books, writing, and thinking that had most influenced my life last year. Today, I want to go back to my experience in the primary for Greenville County Council.

Reflecting on the experience, I’ve realized how vividly it brought to life the ideas we often explore here: how the medium shapes the message, how we create symbols and infuse them with meaning, and how we come to “know” what we know. Running for office turned these abstract concepts into real-world challenges, especially when navigating the main “town squares” of our era—social media platforms—and the limitations they impose on meaningful conversation.

Most political discussions today happen online, and there’s a clear benefit: People who might never have participated in public discourse can now join the conversation, weigh in, and make their voices heard. However, the drawbacks are profound because these platforms strip context from discussions, reducing their depth and utility.

Imagine overhearing this at an airport:

Person 1: "Did you make sure it’s ready? We can’t afford to mess this up."
Person 2: "Yes, it’s all set. It’ll go off exactly as planned."

Without context, this exchange could be interpreted as anything from mundane to catastrophic. What you don’t know is that these individuals are event planners talking about a conference reveal, not something sinister. This example illustrates a simple but crucial point: context is everything.

Social media, by design, removes context. Facebook groups, Twitter (or X), and Instagram don’t provide the space or structure for nuanced conversations. Instead, they create fragmented discussions that bounce between topics without resolution. I was tagged in countless threads during my campaign and asked to weigh in on various issues. I’d take the time to compose thoughtful responses, only for the conversation to move on—or loop back around when someone else raised the same topic slightly differently. Over time, repeating the same context became exhausting and unsustainable.

And then there are the “drive-by” comments—one-liners or inflammatory statements dropped into the conversation before the commenter disappears, leaving no room for meaningful dialogue. These moments, encouraged by the platforms’ engagement-driven algorithms, derail any chance at productive discussion. Platforms reward the short, snippy, attention-grabbing content, while thoughtful, nuanced posts often go unnoticed.

This creates a difficult choice: simplify complex issues so much that they lose meaning or provide complete, accurate context and hope someone takes the time to engage. Local problems—often the most impactful but least glamorous—have a limited audience. Add the challenges of the medium, and it’s no wonder substantive conversations are so rare.

As we’ve discussed, the medium is the message, and today’s digital media are reshaping how and what we can talk about. Running for office made this reality inescapably clear. While I didn’t win, the lessons I learned about communication, community, and the limits of our current platforms will inform everything I do.

Alan Jacobs in How To Think talks about how “it is not possible to ‘think for yourself’ in the sense of thinking independently of others; and… how the pressures imposed on us by Inner Rings [see C. S. Lewis] make genuine thinking almost impossible by making belonging contingent on conformity.” The rage-inducing dynamics of social media can become a performance to prove conformity. Jacobs goes on to note:

The only real remedy for the dangers of false belonging is the true belonging to, true membership in, a fellowship of people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted.1

A bit later, he adds, while describing a closed Twitter/X community he built,

These people… are not necessarily like-minded, but they are temperamentally disposed to openness and have habits of listening–and in that sense are wonderfully like-hearted.2

Even in online communities, where all the incentives are pushing against us, prudence and civility are choices we can make. As we move into 2025, I hope you will consider how the communities you are around are affecting your thinking. Do you find yourself in an echo chamber, with your acceptance contingent on conformity, or are you more interested in anti-fragile relationships that can bear the weight of disagreement?

Thanks for reading, and as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

_________

Social image by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

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As an overview. of 2024…

• Earlier in the year, there was a mix of the carry-over of what I had started late in 2023. As the campaign ramped up, especially from March through June, little “high-minded” reading was happening.

• After the primary, I found myself “free-floating” for the first time in a few years. My attention, which had been so consumed by what felt like the tyranny of the moment, was released, and that sudden break caused a bit of whiplash. It was an interesting thing to have pursued something with such fervor and have it come up short. I found myself longing for a story of a hard pursuit, which led me to pick up The Fellowship of the Ring by Tolkien. I had been meaning to re-read for a while but finally found myself drawn to it.

• Shortly after the primary ended, Jonah Goldberg’s podcast The Remnant featured an interview with author Luke Burgis (Apple | Spotify | Web). I had never heard of Burgis, but coming out of the primary season, his thoughts derived from the work of René Girard and the contagiousness of desires resonated with me. Learning more about Burgis, I came across this interview where he called Don Quixote “the greatest book ever written,” which made me very curious, given my wandering mental state at the time. I remember reading excerpts of it in high school, and there was something about a windmill, but I didn’t know the plot. I picked up a copy and dove in.

• If you want to trigger some cognitive dissonance, read Don Quixote and The Fellowship of the Ring simultaneously. In one, a “nobody” living in obscurity becomes pivotal to the world's fate and reluctantly acts accordingly. In the other, a “nobody” living in obscurity imagines himself as pivotal to the fate of the world (or at least ancient Spain) and enthusiastically acts accordingly. That invites the question: which situation do we find ourselves in?

• Later in the fall, Burgis released a “Philosophy for Creators and Entrepreneurs” reading list (you can get it here). A core idea I’ve absorbed from Bugis that goes with the themes of my writing here is that our desires are shaped by the ideas around us, so if we want better desires, we need to surround ourselves with better ideas. This isn’t uniquely profound, but sometimes that feels fresh in my current season of life. As I finished Part 1 of Don Quixote, I found myself diving into Homer's Odyssey, and I’ve picked up a copy of Augustine’s Confessions as I’m working into the new year.

• Not reflected in my list of reading because I didn’t finish any of the books yet is all of the reading about the history of Greenville County and South Carolina I’ve been doing for another project (more to come later).

Below, find a complete list of all the books I finished in 2024 and a (transparently AI-written) summary of each book. While my interests tend to meander from subject to subject, I hope you find some titles in here. I’ll add some of my own notes about the titles that stood out to me as well to highlight my favorites

1. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta (Non-Fiction)
   A deep dive into the intersection of faith and politics in modern America, this book explores how evangelical Christianity has shaped, and been shaped by, political power. Alberta provides a nuanced look at the tensions and transformations within these communities.

2. A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law (Edited by Michael Cromartie, Non-Fiction)
   A compelling collection of essays exploring the interplay between Protestant and Catholic perspectives on natural law, this book examines its role in shaping Christian ethics and public policy, fostering ecumenical dialogue on shared moral foundations.

3. Escape into Meaning by Evan Puschak (Non-Fiction)
   A collection of essays exploring pop culture, philosophy, and everyday life, this book connects seemingly mundane topics like Superman and public benches to larger existential questions.

4. Liberty for All by Andrew T. Walker (Non-Fiction)
   A compelling argument for religious freedom as a cornerstone of pluralistic society, Walker emphasizes the importance of protecting the rights of all faiths, not just one's own. - I found this book helpful in thinking about a coherent Christian and Conservative approach to pluralism.

5. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Fiction)
   A heartfelt story about creativity, friendship, and ambition, this novel follows two friends who create video games while navigating their evolving personal and professional relationships.

6. Trust the Plan by Will Sommer (Non-Fiction)
   An investigative look at the QAnon movement, this book traces its origins, growth, and cultural impact, offering insight into why such ideas resonate with so many.

7. Ghosted: An American Story by Nancy French (Non-Fiction)
   A poignant memoir weaving together personal loss and broader reflections on identity and belonging, French's narrative is both intimate and thought-provoking.

8. Exiles by Preston Sprinkle (Non-Fiction)
   Examining the tension between faith and culture, Sprinkle invites Christians to live faithfully as "exiles" in a society that often opposes their values.

9. Bullies and Saints by John Dickson (Non-Fiction)
   An honest look at the Church’s history, this book balances its moral failures with the good it has brought to the world, urging readers to confront the truth about its legacy. - I really enjoyed this retelling of Christian history and picked up a lot of primary sources that I may go back and engage with.

10. The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack (Non-Fiction)
    An accessible and entertaining guide to the end of the universe, astrophysicist Mack explains the scientific theories behind how the cosmos might eventually cease to exist.

11. Learning to Disagree by John Inazu (Non-Fiction)
    A practical guide to navigating disagreements with empathy and respect, this book emphasizes the importance of humility and understanding in a divided world. - This was a recommendation that came from a summer episode of Advisory Opinions that I absolutely loved. (Apple | Spotify | Web)

12. The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis (Fiction/Allegory)
    A thought-provoking allegory about heaven and hell, Lewis explores themes of free will, redemption, and the choices that shape our eternal destinies. - A short read classic by Lewis

13. A Non-Anxious Presence by Mark Sayers (Non-Fiction)
    Sayers offers strategies for leading effectively in a world marked by anxiety and complexity, calling for Christian leaders to be calm and steady in turbulent times.

14. The After Party by Curtis Chang and Nancy French (Non-Fiction)
    A critique of partisanship in Christian politics, this book advocates for a renewed vision of public engagement rooted in faith and unity.

15. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (Fiction/Fantasy)
    The first part of Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy, this novel follows Frodo Baggins as he embarks on a perilous journey to destroy the One Ring.

16. An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage (Non-Fiction)
    A fascinating exploration of how food has shaped human history, Standage examines the cultural, political, and technological implications of what we eat. - I got this from another episode of The Remnant and really enjoyed it. (Apple | Spotify | Web)

17. The Flourishing Family by David and Amanda Erickson (Non-Fiction)
    A guide to Christ-centered parenting, this book offers practical advice for nurturing purpose and resilience in a culture often at odds with family values.

18. Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg (Non-Fiction)
    A sweeping analysis of Western civilization’s decline, Goldberg argues that tribalism, populism, and identity politics threaten democracy’s foundational principles.

19. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (Non-Fiction)
    This book addresses the anxiety epidemic among children and teens, offering insights for parents to foster resilience and emotional health in a hyper-connected world.

20. Wanting by Luke Burgis (Non-Fiction)
    Drawing on the concept of mimetic desire, Burgis examines how our wants are shaped by others and offers strategies for understanding and reshaping these influences. - This is Luke Burgis own book on memetic desires, and I found it really a great encapsulation of his ideas.

21. Don Quixote, Part 1 by Miguel de Cervantes (Fiction/Classic)
    A comedic yet profound tale of a delusional knight and his faithful squire, this classic explores themes of idealism, reality, and the human condition.

22. The Odyssey by Homer (Fiction/Classic Epic)
    This ancient Greek epic recounts the adventures of Odysseus as he struggles to return home after the Trojan War, exploring themes of resilience, cunning, and homecoming.

23. Love Does by Bob Goff (Non-Fiction)
    A collection of whimsical, heartfelt stories, Goff shares his experiences to encourage readers to embrace a life of love, adventure, and generosity.

24. Over Ruled by Neil Gorsuch (Non-Fiction)
    Gorsuch critiques modern judicial activism and argues for a return to the constitutional principles that prioritize the rule of law and individual liberties.

25. Table for Two by Amor Towles (Fiction)
    A charming collection of romantic stories centered around shared meals, Towles celebrates the connections formed over good food and conversation. - I have loved every book by Amor Towles, and this was no exception. I think I listened to this whole audio book in about three days.

26. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien (Fiction/Fantasy)
    The second installment of The Lord of the Rings, this novel deepens the journey of Frodo and his companions as they face new challenges in the battle against Sauron.

I hope you found this helpful. Moving into 2025, I aim to get back to writing here more. Thanks for reading today, and see you again soon!

I’ve gone silent because I’m running for Greenville County Council here in the upstate of South Carolina, and as it turns out, that will consume a lot of my time over the next few months. So, like I did when I participated in the Leaf Fellowship, I will take a break from this project, at least until June (the Primary date is June 11). You can learn more about my campaign and follow along via email by signing up here. 

If you can and have found value in my thinking here, I would appreciate your financial support in this campaign effort. You can contribute here.

Stay tuned for other opportunities to help if you're in the area.

Thanks for your support here! See you again soon.

Every year since 2020, I’ve worked hard to make it through at least 20 books on various subjects. Someone once said engaging with books instead of only articles and podcasts is helpful as creating a book-length work on a subject typically requires an author to go deeper than they would for another medium.

This year’s reading goal was just to read what I could. Welcoming a new son into our family this year, most of my reading was driven by my participation in the Leaf Fellowship, with a few others sprinkled in for good measure. You can see the list below in no particular order:

1. Strong and Weak by Andy Crouch

2. The Political Disciple by Vincent Bacote

3. Disruptive Witness by Alan Noble

4. The Evangelical Imagination by Karen Swallow Prior

5. Looking for the Hidden Folk by Nancy Marie Brown

6. The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

7. Chip War by Chris Miller

8. “Here Are Your Gods” by Christopher JH Wright

9. Fixer-Upper by Jenny Schuetz

10. Timothy Keller by Collin Hansen

11. Romeny: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins

12. Reading While Black by McMauley

13. Calvinism For A Secular Age by Joustra and Joustra

14. The Mortification of Sin by John Owen

15. Mine! By Michael Heller and James Salzman

16. On Getting Out of Bed by Alan Noble

17. Life Together by Dedrick Bonhoeffer

18. The Libertarian Mind by David Boaz

19. Culture Making by Andy Crouch

20. When the Kings Come Marching In by Richard Mouw

21. He Shines in All That’s Fair by Richard Mouw

In writing, this year on C&C, we published about 20 articles. Of those, a few stand out as my favorites of the year:

• The Quiet Shift

• Message in a Metal Box

• Ice Cream, Ice Cream...Read All About It?

I keep thinking I’m going to run out of things to write about on C&C, but as we live in a rich world where the media landscape is always changing, I’m excited to have plenty to write about as we move into 2024.

Over at Taylors TownSquare, I also write articles every month. I think taking time to help people understand what’s happening in our county is vitally important, and I hope you will enjoy these writings. You can see them all here, but I received a lot of responses from our September article called “Who Fixes the Roads in Greenville?”.

Finally, I was featured in several other media pieces this year.

• I was interviewed by Simple Civics: Greenville County about the Historic and Natural Resources Trust

• I was also interviewed by that same podcast about Taylors TownSquare

• Fox Carolina featured me in their reporting about Chick Springs

• I had the opportunity to do an interview with Bold Journey

I’m thankful for all the great people I could talk to and work with this year. I’m very excited about all of the things in the works for 2024, and I look forward to catching up with you then! 

Until next time, thanks for reading.

A few weeks back, a lot of reporting outlined how Osama bin Laden’s early 2000s “Letter to America” was “going viral” on TikTok. A quick Google News search surfaces hundreds of articles and think pieces breaking down the letter and what it means that today’s youth have found and are interacting with the letter’s content for the first time in the context of the current conflict in the Middle East. However, all may not be what it seems. Reporting from the Washington Post breaks down how, while the post did gain traction on the platform, most of the traction was triggered by the reporting on the “trending” nature of the videos. Essentially, the articles and online discussion created by the initial reporting on the trending videos caused the letter to “trend” more than the original videos had.

All of this raises the question: How do we determine something is noteworthy? Of course, the fact that the original videos had been viewed a couple of million times at the initial reporting seems worth noting. If I had a video or piece of content viewed a couple of million times, I would be jumping up and down. But in absolute terms, 2 million views on a TikTok video is not uncommon. As we see now, the attention brought to the “trend” by the reporting seems to have escalated the situation far more than it would have otherwise.

In our age of fragmented media, it’s harder to know when something has truly gone “viral” or is “trending.” Gone are the days when Facebook and Twitter were the only games in town, letting us get a quick pulse on what captured most of the online culture’s attention. Today, to say something is “trending” or “viral” is a conjecture at best and should often be qualified as trending in this particular network or viral on this platform. As the audiences of these platforms are so fragmented, it becomes easier to look at something happening over in one network and tell people something is “trending” with little contextual evidence. In this case, the outrage cycle begins as an audience is primed to believe what they are hearing. As news of the outrage from the “other side” spreads, it inspires “rubberneckers” to see what all the fuss is about. And the cycle continues.

This predicament brings us to the point: Should something’s “trending” or “viral” status make it worthy of our time? What should our standard be for when something becomes noteworthy? There is no clear-cut answer for this, but as moral panics like this continue to happen, we have to consider the best way to promote the spread of ideas we find helpful. If reporting things like this spreads the message further, what’s the right course of action to take? These are hard questions to grapple with, but I hope we sincerely consider them next time we are tempted to hit the share button on a news article.

With that, thanks for reading, and see you again next time. 

When I think about how the medium impacts the message, one of the ways that quickly comes to mind is the menus found in stores. We usually feel like we are in control of what we purchase. We walk into a store, we look for the products we want, either on a shelf or from a menu board, and then we move along and make our purchase. And in one sense, that’s true. I go into a coffee shop, look at the menu, and purchase. There’s typically more going on than that, however.

If we stop and consider the menu or story layout even as a medium, what’s the message it tells us? Let’s think about a typical menu setup: Small or Large. When presented with two options, we’ve made it a binary decision, and the outcome is hard to predict. In The Myth of Experience, the authors Emre Soyer and Robin Hogarth give the example of getting a toddler to wear a coat (an experience I’ve not quite gotten to yet but is coming for me). In their telling, when we’re just trying to get a child to wear a coat, we’ve given them a binary option: coat or no coat. The authors then suggest we use a little “option design” and instead provide them with a choice between two coats.1 Now, the decision is between the two coats, not between coat or no coat. True, sometimes this might not work, but the experience is now more optimized so that most of the time, you are just getting the child to choose between the two coats.

Taking this back into the store and menu world, we frequently encounter decoy options or options that are not meant to be chosen but are there to “anchor” or give context to another option. 

Let’s consider the Starbucks menu. In his 2018 analysis, Kent Hendricks shares how the center stage effect, the compromise effect, and the attraction effect work together to push us to the menu's literal center, then to the middle or large option.

First is the center stage effect, about which Hendricks writes:

Whichever iteration of Starbucks’ menu you look at, you will focus on the middle before the edges. You look at middle rows before the top and bottom rows. And you look at middle prices before you look at cheaper or more expensive options.2

From there, Hendricks moves on to the compromise effect:

Until the mid-1990s, Starbucks offered three drink options: Short, Tall, and Grande. Most people avoided the extremes–Short and Grande–and ordered Tall drinks.

But when Starbucks dropped the Short size from the menu and added the Venti size, the Grande became the middle—and most frequently selected—option.3

And then he moves on to the attraction effect: 

To simplify what’s happening: the distance between the Tall and the Grande is much greater than the distance between the Grande and the Venti. This effectively excludes the Tall from your choice set.4

You can check out his complete analysis of background psychology and a few additional points he makes. Still, for our purposes, the point is that while we look at a menu and think we are the only participants in deciding which drink to order, we forget a crucial rule of all media: as we engage with the media of the menu, it’s shaping us back. In this case, the work the Starbucks menu is doing on us is to frame our choices so that we are guided to the optimum decision. Put another way, Soyer and Hogarth note:

As consumers, we have a much easier time making up our minds under [companies] well-created option designs. The crucial issue, however, is that they get to determine our anchors and adjustments, in many cases by employing fine-tuned decoys.5

As you know, I like to end my essays here with a prompt for further thinking. I like how Hendricks ends his post, so I’ll let his challenge carry us out today:

Next time you’re in line at Starbucks, it’s worth pondering:

• Am I a rational being?

• Does free will exist?

• Do I produce my choices, or do my choices produce me?

  Enjoy your drink.6

Social image by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Another example of a medium shift that has stuck in my mind over the years is the lowly shipping container. I know I see shipping containers all over the place: on the backs of trucks, rail cars, near the airport, and they are all generally the same. Typically, I don’t think about shipping containers, but in the past few years, shipping and logistics have been more at the forefront due to the pandemic-era supply shortages. We all remember hearing of the extreme backups at US ports that finally dissipated about a year ago. Still, in general, the logistics of global transport faded back into the background the moment those backups stopped, allowing us to buy the things we wanted.

All of this, of course, glosses over what’s to me a most interesting question: in a world where we can’t even agree on the same units of measure and temperature, how in the world did we wind up with a standard shipping container that is generally the same all over the world? 

The history of what’s called containerization, or the change from transporting bulk cargo in the hulls of ships and other transport vehicles that then had to be re-sorted at each destination, to the use of standard shipping containers that can be loaded at the source and moved from vehicle to vehicle to vehicle, starts to help us understand that question. A few years ago, a podcast on this subject piqued my interest, and if you’re looking for a dive into this subject, it contains more information than I’ll cover in my writing today.1 

What I’m interested in for our purposes is thinking about shipping containers as a medium, and every medium has a message. Broadly, when we think about it, one of the shipping container's main messages is, “It should be easy to move things around.” Before the 1960s, many regional attempts at containerization had been attempted. Still, it took the US military in the thick of the Vietnam War to change that message to “It should be easy to move my supplies from North America to Southeast Asia.” 

That was, of course, only the beginning—the effect of containerization went far beyond the vehicles. Ports had to change physically or were displaced by nearby ports that could be purpose-built for containers. The labor port workers provided switched from breaking and sorting bulk cargo to moving large boxes around after they arrived so they could be transported out of the dock by ship or rail. Overall, shipping costs decreased due to the global standardization of the shipping container. Where I live in the Upstate of South Carolina, the Inland Port of Greer, which is a rail extension of the Port of Charleston, is made possible by containerization. Containers may be dropped off here, 200 miles inland, and transported by rail. This reduces the need for the port to utilize expensive ocean-front real estate for cargo storage and simplifies logistics for companies looking to move things around the world.

However, the message of “it should be easy to move things around the world” is complicated. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the move towards our modern global shipping container standards immediately preceded the era of intense globalization that occurred in the following decades. Did the shipping container lead to the fall of the Soviet Union? Probably not directly, but the era of globalism it enabled undoubtedly didn’t help.

It not only became easier to move materials from the United States to overseas, it also became easier to move materials from outside the United States inside. The United States trade deficit went negative roughly 20 years after our modern era of shipping containers began, meaning that the US imports more value in goods per year than it exports, and that deficit shows no signs of ending soon despite the rhetoric of bombastic politicians.

Hopefully, what’s clear from this discussion is that the lowly shipping container is not a value-neutral enterprise. It has many messages, some contradictory and complicated, but present nonetheless. We usually don’t think about shipping containers themselves as a medium. They are just a thing. There are also many other ways to break this down: the way shipping containers reduce all of their contents, whether it’s medical supplies or tools of war, to be the same: a unit to be transported; or the way discrete containerization makes it possible to know where our goods specifically are at any time in the route from point A to point B.

My point today for us to think about is what mediums are, even if we don’t think about them like that. What are the messages of those mediums? Do those messages complement the values we articulate, or do they contradict them? What changes do we need to make in response?

And with that, thanks for reading. See you again soon.

_________________________________

A fun fact I learned while writing this: Chili peppers are native to North America and didn’t exist in the rest of the world before the Columbian Exchange. This means all those fun chili-spiced dishes I get from Chinese and Indian restaurants are a product of the last 500 years. I always love learning what things didn’t exist in the rest of the world before the Columbian exchange, so I hope you enjoy this fun fact, too.

Social image by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

While I’ve been out, I’ve been working through the audiobook version of Disruptive Witness by Alan Noble, which broadly walks through the implications of distraction on us as individuals, churches, and how Christians are to impact society. This book is a few years old, but it nicely summarizes and rearticulates some points from other readings I’ve done by Charles Taylor and James K. A. Smith over the past few years in very approachable terms. 

The key jumping-off point into these works for Noble is our distracted way of living, constantly shifting our focus from one thing to the next. Some of those things we clearly feel are not helpful, but we live in a way where we constantly move on to the next thing. The “electronic buzz of the twenty-first century” is ultimately “suffocating.”1 Noble walks through how living with this constant buzz saps our mental energy, which leaves us unable to deal critically with much of anything, negatively impacting our Christian “witness.” 

While between chapters of this book, I also listened to PJ Vogt’s latest episode of Search Engine, in which he interviews Ezra Klein, formerly of Vox and now at The New York Times, to ask him, “Is there a sane way use the internet now?” Klein’s response centers around the shift in how he’s thought about the internet in terms of what he’s asking from his use: “How much information can it give me?” to “What type of attention is it affording to me?”

Klein goes down into the depths of topics we’ve covered in this Substack before through that frame, highlighting Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and other aspects of media theory that we’ve held core to what we’ve been digging through if you’ve been reading here a while. 

Klein quotes a passage from Understanding Media that I had missed previously,

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.2

Klein and Vogt go on through the episode to talk about how social media has trained us to think in terms of tweets and all of the implications for our civil discourse. They talk about Klein’s career through different media outlets, the way his mental model for media has changed over time, and where they go from here.

As I was thinking about these pieces together, I was struck by how, at the core, we find the same thing: attention. Our culture doesn’t afford us the same opportunity to learn to pay attention as in the past, and so the perceived quality of our connections on all fronts has suffered.

I think back to a topic I’ve written about several times over at Taylors TownSquare: loneliness. In an article I wrote earlier this year, I quoted Derek Thompson in The Atlantic: 

“I tell parents all the time that if Instagram is merely displacing TV, I'm not concerned about it,” Steinberg told me. “But today's teens spend more than five hours daily on social media, and that habit seems to be displacing quite a lot of beneficial activity... Compared with the counterparts in the 2000s, today's teens are less likely to go out with their friends, get their driver's license, or play youth sports.”3

You can see it in the first sentence: we blame the offset time using the media for content, and if only we could use it for different content, things could be better. But that time spent is also imprinting the model of the technology on the person using it, teaching them to think in terms of Instagram or Threads or X or any of the other platforms out there. This way of thinking is inherently counterproductive to deep relationships with others. So we must do more than simply put better safeguards around Instagram if we want it to be less damaging to kids. 

Another thing that jumps out at me is how the war for your attention must be waged on a personal level. There’s no way to use technology, to dig ourselves out of this technology-induced attention hole. Still, there are personal choices we can make as individuals to impact our lives. We can leave our phones outside the room when having a meaningful conversation. We can let ourselves be “bored” for a few minutes while waiting for something rather than instinctively pulling our phones out of our pockets. We can push through the discomfort we feel when talking with someone face to face, knowing that at least some of the reason we feel uncomfortable is what the media we have all been saturated in has taught us: unhelpful social habits. 

So today, I ask us to think about our media habits and what unintended lessons we’ve learned from those habits about how to attend to the world. Our attention is our most valuable resource, and we must learn to use it better in our distracted age.

Further reading:

• This is a topic Klein seems to have been thinking about a lot over the past few years. You can see an opinion piece he wrote about it last year here.

Social image by Todd Trapani on Unsplash

In an age of superabundance of facts, the emphasis is no longer on good data but on having lots of data. The process of finding and researching things is governed by probability, so the incentives align to encourage people to pump as much information into the world as possible, regardless of its quality. 

I think about this a lot in the world of SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is the science and art of getting content to rank higher in search engines, and it’s generally geared towards creating lots and lots of content that contains keywords that people are searching for and, therefore, search engines can pick up on. On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong in general with making it easier for content on the web to be found by the websites we use to search the internet. On the other hand, this incentive leads to the creation of thousands of clickbait websites and pieces of content that exist to get people to click on them, which triggers an ad to be shown, earning a few cents for the company that created the clickbait content. 

As time has passed, the search engines get better and better at filtering out the useless content created simply for clicks. This move has its consequences: it makes it harder for people making good content to have their content discovered, and it causes the people making clickbait to get better at making clickbait to keep attracting clicks. 

Another facet is Large Language Models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT. These prediction engines take a prompt and start creating a response by predicting the next word on the page. LLMs can be tremendous tools for many applications, but like any technology, they have their tradeoffs. Neil Postman wrote, “When statistics and computers are joined, volumes of garbage are generated in public discourse”1 In our age of information superabundance, we have unleashed a new tool to pump more and more content into the world that a human has not reflected upon. 

In the passage of Technopoly, Postman goes on to discuss the useless facts that sportscasters come up with to discuss while on air. He cites some examples from the mid-80s when he wrote this book, but as I think about watching College Gameday on ESPN recently, I don’t have to think far for my own examples. Postman observes, “It is surprising how frequently such blather will serve as the backbone of conversations which are essentially meaningless.”2 Postman, of course, knew nothing of LLMs at the time of writing. Still, he perceived the outcome that could arise: a world flooded with generated text.

Going even further, we realize that the rise of LLM-filled web content poses a considerable risk to the creation of future LLMs. The models that underlie these tools are created by “training” a computer on lots of source data that help them learn to predict what will come next. Training a model on its own output creates a dangerous loop where the only input to the model is the output. As we flood the web with LLM-created text, we are effectively making it impossible to develop better LLMs in the future.

Thanks to a boom in generative artificial intelligence, programs that can produce text, computer code, images and music are readily available to the average person. And we’re already using them: AI content is taking over the Internet, and text generated by “large language models” is filling hundreds of websites, including CNET and Gizmodo. But as AI developers scrape the Internet, AI-generated content may soon enter the data sets used to train new models to respond like humans. Some experts say that will inadvertently introduce errors that build up with each succeeding generation of models.

A growing body of evidence supports this idea. It suggests that a training diet of AI-generated text, even in small quantities, eventually becomes “poisonous” to the model being trained. Currently there are few obvious antidotes.3

Humans are not probability engines and have more discernment on the whole than a large language model has. But if consuming their content is poisonous to LLMs, we should be concerned about what a world flooded by unreflected-upon AI-generated mush will do to humans. 

More is not always better, and in a world of superabundance of information, more makes it harder to know what we should be listening to. 

As we go forward, how can we be more intentional about the content we are consuming, and as content creators, how can we balance the trade-offs we are incentivized to make in our age of information superabundance?

With that, thanks for reading, and see you again soon.

Social image by Izabel 🏳️‍🌈 on Unsplash

Do you ever get Facebook notifications that ask you to reflect on what you’ve posted? As I’m writing this post, here’s a selection of things I wrote many years ago on this date:

Reviewing these posts, they have gone strong for many years and dropped off about 2015. I see the same trend on my Instagram, although a few years delayed. Somewhere around 2017-2018, my quantity of posts drops way off, as if a switch was flipped. When I post now, it’s mostly a story that disappears in 24 hours. Roll back the clock fifteen years (in 2008), and you’ll find that I felt that everyone needed to know that I “[love] this Piarte (sic) English Language setting on Facebook.” 

As I reflect on this trend in my life, I see it in others as well. Whatever the app, when I look at the profiles of people who’ve been using social media mainly since the get-go, for most users in my sphere, there was a time when we all posted a lot more than we do today, and then as if we call agreed it was not working out, we all stopped.

But it’s also not like people left the platforms. My wife and I welcomed a son into the world earlier this year, and we regularly share photos showing his progress as the months go by. As I’m out and about and run into people I’ve not seen in years, they all ask me, “is your son’s hair really that red?” They are seeing the photos we share; they are just not sharing back any of their own. 

Again, I see what feels like the same trend play out. I get on Instagram and consume the content that others are making. I love seeing updates from far away friends, but the pool of people I can stay up-to-date with in this method gets smaller and smaller as people share less and less. While I don’t use Facebook nearly as much as I used to, I still find myself getting on Instagram, but now the content I’m mostly seeing isn’t from people I know; it’s from accounts that are making short-form videos that make me laugh, which are mostly made by “creators” and ripped out of their original context on TikTok. 

When I go over to TikTok, the situation isn’t much different; I’m just seeing the meme videos a few days before they will be circulating on Instagram Reels. My friends' content (if there is any in there) never bubbles up to the surface of the algorithm; all I see is content from brands and creators. 

This series of casual observations I’ve quietly been making in my head was snapped into focus when I caught a post from Kate Lindsey in Embedded. She notes,

No one really posts anymore, no one’s having fun, and it’s partly for this reason that no one seems excited about any of the newer apps and features, like Threads, that keep popping up despite everything.

“As more people have been confronted with the consequences of constant sharing, social media has become less social and more media—a constellation of entertainment platforms where users consume content but rarely, if ever, create their own,” a recent Insider piece explains. “Influencers, marketers, average users, and even social-media executives agree: Social media, as we once knew it, is dead.”1

This is a fascinating example of social media shaping us back. We’ve talked a lot before about how the tools we use shape us back; how the use of a car, for example, makes us people who are not as good at walking, or the use of a calculator makes us not as good at doing math in our heads. This isn’t to say a car or a calculator are wrong; we just have to recognize them as tradeoffs. 

In the same way, the social media experience as it existed in the earlier days of social media was much more oriented towards getting us to share instead of simply consuming content. But today’s social media landscape is almost flipped around. TikTok does make it very easy to share videos; it’s even easier just to sit there lost in the time vortex as the feed brings you funny video after funny video. Lindsey writes,

Apps began prioritizing algorithms and discovery and ways of increasing views that de-emphasized direct connection, putting us all in the same place while somehow tearing us further apart.2

So it’s perhaps no accident that most of us stopped posting. The platforms themselves changed in a way that made it feel like our posts no longer mattered, deprioritizing direct human connection in favor of feeds that drew us in for hours on end. 

This brings us to a point of reflection: how have the tools you’ve been using for so long shifted from under you, and are they still fulfilling the then purpose that made you start using them in the first place? Most of the time, I’m not a fan of change for its own sake, but there are times when we should overcome our status quo bias and realize it’s time to do something differently. As the tools we use change, the trade-off we make by using them is also ever-shifting. 

With that, thanks for reading, and see you again soon.

This subtly makes sense. To start a new venture, you typically see at least one aspect of the world differently enough to feel compelled to start something new that plugs that gap. Sometimes, the gap seen in the world is contained. In other cases, entrepreneurs seem to see something fundamentally different about the world and are willing to bet some part of their livelihood to prove it. This brings to mind the Steve Jobs “reality distortion field” or, more recently Elon Musk’s sphere of influence.

In Drunk Tank Pink, Adam Alter walks through several stories to illustrate a key premise: “Much of what we consider to be real is a direct product of the standards determined by the people around us.”1

Alter walks through several stories of children who were raised for some period of their formative years outside human society. The reasons are generally unfortunate, but since “children acquire most of their social and linguistic skills during a critical window early in their lives,” these experiences had dramatic effects.2

Alter then describes the experience of adults who voluntarily and under the guise of social experiments, stayed in solitude for hours to months, to various unpleasant effects. Some prisoners in solitary confinement “experienced hallucinations, profound depression, confusion, perceptual distortion, memory loss, and paranoia.”3

Alter then moves on to a power company trying to help its customers reduce their power usage. He shares how the company began printing a reference to show each customer how their usage was compared to an “average” customer’s. The small shift resulted in a 2.5% decrease in usage for the customers given the comparison, which I imagine is something like what Duke Energy now includes in my energy bill. This adaptation has since been adopted more broadly; you can see here my home’s power usage compared to “average” and “efficient” users. 

Alter articulates “that people don’t know how to evaluate their power without knowing how much electricity other households are consuming,” so including this type of information in the report made the difference.4

So, what does this have to do with entrepreneurs? As Alter observes, “we tend to lose our sense of reality when we’re unable to confirm our version of the world with that of other people.”5 This “social location” function of experience helps us to place ourselves in the world and grounds us to what is “normal.”

In the case of entrepreneurs, they tend to be around a lot more people who also see the world in different ways. If you’re only ever around people who think the color blue is actually green, then after a while, blue starts to “look” like green. We also have the tendency to mimic those around us, meaning this cycle becomes self-enforcing.

Of course, this is not to say that the underlying “truth” of the world has changed, but our perception of the world is actually what matters more in terms of how we behave. Our vision of the world and the deep truths we believe but don’t speak that are down in us inform how we take steps to accomplish things in the world. So, in a sense, entrepreneurs really might see the world differently, not because it actually is different but because they perceive it to be. 

So if you find yourself stuck in a rut, perhaps the answer is to situate yourself with different people or in a different location where people see the world in the way you want to. This isn’t some mysterious force, but as it turns out, we are always shaped by the people and places around us.

With that, thanks for reading, and see you next week. 

When I was growing up in church culture in the 1990s, post-modernism was one of the big bogeymen. I gathered from listening to others that the postmodern disregard for truth would come from people ignoring common sense facts to make up their reality. With time and distance, however, the far more pervasive and insidious postmodernism I see today is not from a lack of caring about facts but from a lack of discernment about which “facts” should be paid attention to. 

Jon Askonas, writing in the Spring 2023 issue of The New Atlantis, notes:

Our understanding of what it means to know something about the world has comprehensively changed multiple times in history.1

Askonas outlines the history of the term "fact," which was not naturally occurring but was a creation of the 17th century. Before this, he writes, knowledge was based on personal experiences, observations, or religious and philosophical beliefs. The invention of the printing press, among other factors, revolutionized how facts were produced and disseminated. The coffeehouse culture of the 17th century, combined with the printed word, played a pivotal role in establishing facts as we know them today. The standardization of measurements and tools further solidified the concept of facts.

You’ll quickly notice the printing press at the core of that transition. Askonas writes,

It was this immutability of printed books that made them so important to the establishment of facts. Handwritten manuscripts had been inconsistent and subject to constant revision. Any kind of technical information was notoriously unreliable: Copyists had a hard enough time maintaining accuracy for texts whose meaning they understood, much less for the impenetrable ideas of experimenters. But for science to function, the details mattered. Printing allowed scientists to share technical schema, tables of data, experiment designs, and inventions far more easily, durably, and accurately, and with illustrative drawings to boot.2

“The medium is the message.” That’s the line that started the study of media ecology and one of the first topics I tackled in these essays in February 2021. That line is somewhat abstract but contains a great truth: there’s more to what you’re saying than the message's contents; how you say it matters. However, applying that truth to history shows us that the creation of new mediums (the printed book) enabled a new type of message: the creation of facts.

At this point, Askonas pulls in L. M. Sacasas’s notion of “superabundance” (I wrote about it here). Askonas explains,

Who could look at the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with 410,000 entries across thirty-two volumes, and not see abundance? At about $1,500 a set, that’s only a third of a penny per entry!... But cheaper still is Wikipedia, which currently has 6,635,949 English-language entries at a cost per entry of absolutely nothing. Abundance is a third of a penny per entry. Superabundance is fifteen times as many entries for free.3

The proliferation of facts in the electric age has a watering-down effect. There are so many facts that each fact becomes less important than the overall narrative the facts tell.

Few things feel more immutable or fixed than a ball of cold, solid steel. But if you have a million of them, a strange thing happens: they will behave like a fluid, sloshing this way and that, sliding underfoot, unpredictable. In the same way and for the same reason, having a small number of facts feels like certainty and understanding; having a million feels like uncertainty and befuddlement. The facts don’t lie, but data sure does.4

As facts become liquid, they lose their potency. There are enough facts in the world that any particular combination can tell almost any story imaginable, so what becomes valuable are not the facts but the narratives used to string facts together into stories that make sense of the world. The message of electronic communications is that facts are a commodity, and the real value is ideas and the people who articulate those ideas to help you choose which facts are relevant to build narratives around.

Hence back to postmodernism. It’s not just that people stop caring about facts; we buy into flawed narratives that may confirm our closely held beliefs about the world but that don’t represent reality.

So the question for us is, what narratives do we let drive our realities? What’s the litmus test we apply to the world to determine whether a narrative is helpful, trustworthy, and worth basing all our other decisions around? What vision of the world are we buying into, and how do our values flow from that vision and give us the standard to judge all the other narratives we are presented with? 

What that, thanks for reading. See you again soon.

From the Washington Post,

The first results of that research show that the company’s platforms play a critical role in funneling users to partisan information with which they are likely to agree. But the results cast doubt on assumptions that the strategies Meta could use to discourage virality and engagement on its social networks would substantially affect people’s political beliefs.1

The researchers conclude that while Facebook is great at reinforcing beliefs people already hold, Facebook is not nearly as effective at changing someone’s mind. The beliefs we bring into these online interactions are the litmus test for us about what’s “fake news” vs. what’s new information to add to our repository.

This story made me think about an article in the Summer 2023 edition of The New Atlantis. Writer Adam Elkus shares:

So much intellectual effort has been devoted to the reasons why machines — bureaucratic or technical — might execute human desires in a way vastly different than human beings intend. Little to no effort has been exerted in exploring the converse: how humans might confound machines trying to get them to do what the machines want.2

For years, we have taken as a given that humans could be shown information by an algorithm that would change the way they think, but that theory of how the world works doesn’t consider the “friction” caused by humans being humans. Friction is “the way, broadly speaking, the world pushes back when we push forward,” Elkus writes. “Battlefield information proves faulty, men and machines break down, and all manner of other things go wrong. And of course, the greatest source of friction is other people.”3

When we imagine machines slowly leading us to our demise (via social media algorithms polarizing our country or Skynet slowly taking over the world), we typically envision a frictionless situation where everything goes right for the machine. “The computer programs — representing purified, idealized intelligence — never encounter any serious difficulties, especially in getting humans to do what they want, despite being totally dependent on others to act due to their lack of physical embodiment. Because the machines are simply so much smarter than us, they are able to bypass all of the normal barriers we encounter in getting others to do what we want, when we want, and how we want it.”4

So while algorithms are excellent at feeding us content that we will engage with, at the end of the day, humans will be humans. And humans being humans is the greatest source of friction the news feed algorithms have ever encountered: despite exposing us to countless pieces of information that could change our minds, we generally persist with what we believed in the first place.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t be alarmed by many of the other findings in this study (and there are many things to be alarmed at), but I think how this study complicates our picture is also enlightening. Polarization is not a problem that a silver bullet can solve. We can’t just “fix social media” and count on everything else to be okay. You can’t engineer the perfect algorithm to serve specific people just the right pieces of information and call it a day.

The way to change hearts and minds is much more nuanced than that. While yes, at the margins, the information we encounter via these mass media has an impact, the greatest impact comes with humans being humans and interacting with each other in ways that computers and mere exposure to ideas can’t compete with. 

With that, thanks for reading, and see you again soon.

Social image by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Before I do that, you may have noticed that I have enabled paid subscriptions to this newsletter. I’m not going to start charging for new articles, but I do put a good amount of effort and money into the books, articles, and other sources I use to research these articles, along with getting these pieces edited to make sure they are comprehensible to you. Subscribing is a way you can help me offset some of those costs and to allow me to do even more. If you would like to support me, you can subscribe here for $5/month or $50/year. To be clear, all new articles will remain free to access for six months, and after that, they will be accessible to subscribers only. Please consider how you might help further support this little venture.

I know everyone and their brother has a podcast you should listen to. I am a selective podcast listener; I’ll try many things, but I shamelessly unfollow shows that lose interest. There’s just too much to listen to out there. Most of these I listen to at 2x, as I generally listen for exposure. If something piques my interest, I’ll slow down and listen more intently or flag it for later research. Listening at faster speeds keeps my mind engaged as I tend to get distracted at slower speeds, and with some getting used to it, you would be surprised at how much you can absorb. With that said, here are the shows that hold my attention and a stab at why:

• Advisory Opinions: This podcast from The Dispatch has been one of the most helpful to me in making sense of our legal system, which seems to be more in the news these days. Sarah Isgur and David French bring what I think is very helpful conservative legal commentary that gives me a lot of structure to the ambiguous thoughts in my head. I never miss an episode.

• Dear Hank & John: I have followed this one from its origins many years ago, where brothers Hank and John Green give dubious advice and all the week’s news from Mars to AFC Wimbledon. This one is currently on hiatus as Hank undergoes treatment for cancer, but the back catalog is not to be missed. I love the earnestness of the show and the way the hosts engage with so many diverse questions. 

• Plain English: Derek Thompson’s knack for deep dives with individuals who can work through complex subjects is unparalleled. Derek meanders through various subjects in this show, but I appreciate his ability to make complex social trends very approachable.

• Nice Try!: This one from Avery Trufelman, formerly of 99% Invisible which I have referenced in my writings, is a short-run show that explores utopias and how they fail. Season 2 was also great, but the Season 1 episode of the origins of the Oneida Company lives rent-free in my head. I love the earnest grappling with the ideal desires and their (mostly) unfortunate outcomes this show does.

• FiveThirtyEight Politics: As a surprise to no one, I’m a big fan of numbers. I love the generally data-first approach this podcast takes to politics. While there is the occasional tangential political rant, I love the numbers I get from this show that put some structure to my own thoughts. 

• Hard Fork: This is a relatively new entry, but I’ve long enjoyed the work of Kevin Roose, a technology reporter with the New York Times. Kevin and his co-host Casey Newton give what I’ve found to be very helpful commentary on the weekly happenings of technology and culture.

• History of English Podcast: Call this one aspirational. This podcast is a long-running exploration of the history of the English language. The host goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. I don’t listen to this one frequently, but I like to take it in chunks when I’ve burned through the rest of my back catalog.

• Articles of Interest: This one is also a bit of a “when I’m done with everything else” listen, but Avery Trufelman’s exploration of clothing and fashion and how culture came to be.

• The Anthropocene Reviewed: I love John Green’s audio essays where he reviews Hot Dog Eating Contests, Chemotherapy, Dr. Pepper, and more on a 5-star scale. This one no longer adds new episodes, but the back catalog is not to be missed. You can also find the book that later came from this project.

Alright, thanks for reading today, and happy listening. See you next time.

Photo by Jukka Aalho on Unsplash

The book being reviewed, The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman, outlines what the reviewer calls the first of “The Three Acts of Social Movements:”

Social movements might be thought of as comprising three acts. The first act is the subject of Beckerman’s book: small, enclosed, private conversations. The second act is the public salvos of protests, marches, and boycotts that first etch history books and now glow on our screens. The third act deploys power for lasting gains and the acceptance of a new normal.1

In discussing the second act, the initial public conversation before the power of social changes seeps into society, Kim looks at the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement as an example:

In 2014, #blacklivesmatter appeared in only about 400 tweets in one month, about a year after it was first coined. But soon, there were spikes, each time coinciding with a particular death (usually of a black man at the hands of police) or where a legal ruling fell short.2

After walking through some specific examples of this effect, Kim notes:

The problem was that these spikes were part of a sawtooth pattern with lulls between the peaks—social media’s spotlight flits from spectacle to spectacle, outrage to outrage. BLM activists exhausted themselves trying to hold on to their spotlight as little changed institutionally and politically. Also, relationships frayed as airtime, instead of real change, became the commodity for which activists vied.3

I see this pattern play out in society over and over again. In thinking about incentives towards change, it’s so easy in that second step to confuse headlines, tweets, and Facebook posts for the real down-in-the-ditches work it takes to make real change happen in society. It becomes a self-reinforcing phenomenon when individuals celebrate their social media wins as actual wins. 

In 2015, one activist group, Dream Defenders, quit social media for ten weeks after burning out from keeping up with social media. Beckerman quotes Rachel Gilmer, Dream Defenders’ strategist, about the lessons the social media hiatus taught her: I think social media created a sense of false camaraderie among people. . . . We debated but in a petty way. What is the short quippy thing you can say about somebody else’s politics in 140 characters? But that isn’t strategy.4

Tweets and pithy comments only get you so far. How can we become less concerned about who wins the zinger war and more dedicated to the long work of Act 3: real change?

It starts with how we handle ourselves and what actions we reward in others. It’s relatively effortless to make impassioned social media posts that degrade those in power; it’s much harder to dig in to understand what led to the underlying circumstance in the first place and offer honest, constructive feedback.

So the next time you’re hovering over that share button, stop and consider: is there a better way for me to contribute to the change I want to see in the world?

Photo by Danny Lines on Unsplash

Reading has a way of sticking thoughts in your mind. In college, during my senior honors project, the notion of secondary orality stuck in my mind from the writings of McLuhan and Ong. I’ve written about it here and here. Secondary orality is the idea that oral and electric communication-dominated cultures have much more in common than we may think. 

In a nutshell, oral cultures cannot “put down” their thoughts and reflect on them like we do. Critical thinking, as we conceive of it today, is not possible. Subordinate ideas, hierarchical lists, and abstractions don’t work because it’s much harder to “hold” a thought and “come back to it.” Literacy transforms how we think by allowing us to write things down, make lists, and accurately capture things instead of just remembering the gist of something. These shifts may seem minor, but they fundamentally transformed society, especially as we moved into the time of the printing press. Widespread literacy meant that the average person could utilize the technology of writing to gain more control of their thinking. Standardization. Concrete measures of time. These things and more changed how we live. 

Electric communications technologies do a funny thing to culture. Due to the speed of information transfer and the prolific nature of the sharing they allow, elements of society revert to the ways of being before literacy. 

In the Spring 2023 issue of The New Atlantis, Tara Isabella Burton writes about a change happening in the rationalist community. Writing to give some background, she explains:

Central to the rationalist worldview was the idea that nothing — not social niceties, not fear of political incorrectness, certainly not unwarranted emotion — could, or should, get between human beings and their ability to apprehend the world as it really is. One longtime rationalist of my acquaintance described the rationalist credo to me as “truth for truth’s sake.” No topic, no matter how potentially politically incendiary, was off-limits. Truth, the rationalists generally believed, would set humanity free.1

There is a certain confidence in the belief in the finality of a person’s reason that screams of literacy. Being able to abstract the person from our creatureliness, as some in the transhumanist flavor of rationalism believe, is a level of separation and categorization that orality and oral-based cultures couldn't conceive.

As it turns out, that level of abstraction wasn’t tenable even in the rationalist community.

One former high-level employee of the Centre for Effective Altruism, who asked not to be identified by name, called the period he spent there in the 2010s the “most exciting time of my career by quite a lot.”...

But he soon grew disillusioned with the utilitarianism of rationality culture, which focused so intently on quantifiable markers of success — the number of people on college campuses recruited into EA-approved professional fields, say — that it seemed to leave out something profound about the other side of human life.

Effective altruism, he found, “depowered a lot of people. It made them less interesting and vibrant as people, and more like — trying to fit into a slightly soulless bureaucracy of good-doing.”2

Burton goes on in the article to detail the shift that’s taken place in the rationalist community over the past few years. As I’ve been reflecting on her piece, I can’t help but hear echoes of McLuhan and Ong as they reflected 50 years ago on what Secondary Orality might one day look like. The rationalism Burton writes about is the logical conclusion of 500 years of literary culture. It’s the complete takeover of all aspects of life by the idea that reason alone can let humanity flourish. It’s the idolatry of our minds, the belief that we can map out our worlds so entirely that we can remove all the unknown edges, close our eyes, and let the map tell us how to navigate.

As it turns out, that’s no way for a human to live. While I could enjoy Soylent for every meal, I really enjoy it when my wife and I get to visit The Anchorage here in Greenville. I love the endless creative ways simple vegetables can be prepared, and while it might not be the most efficient and rational way to consume my daily calories, I really enjoy it. 

Secondary orality brings many different impacts on our culture, almost all unexpected. But as Ecclesiastes and Battlestar Galactica inform us, “all of this has happened before and it will happen again.” Humans are not wholly rational creatures and are incapable of sustaining a life lived in an entirely rational way forever. There are many places where rationality is a good tool for us to use to work in and make sense of the world, but we have to recognize that it is just that: a tool—one of many tools we have. 

Let’s remember that we live here in a post-literary culture and have many more tools than previous generations. Forcing the tool of rationality on our world will never work because the world is not entirely rational. Our hearts and souls know this to be true; can we also let our minds in on that secret?

With that, thanks for reading. See you next time.

Social image by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Humans are outcome-oriented. We want results we can see. We want to change the outcome if we get a result we don’t like, and the way we change the result is generally to change the process. In the business context, outcome orientation is easy enough. We tweak systems to deliver better outcomes.

I think there’s something analogous here to our notion of the medium is the message. While McLuhan’s point was principally about communications media and information, I think an analogy can be drawn to the process/outcome conversations:

As the medium is the message, the process is the outcome. 

One of the areas I’ve been thinking about the process/outcome orientation in lately is our politics. As I watch our political debates, they usually go something like, “The other side is the enemy of liberty, and my side is your only hope to preserve our society.” 

But on both sides of our political debates, I think you can see a lot of confusion between processes and outcomes. When an outcome I want is supported by a process, I am very for that process. When an outcome I want is contrary to a process, I want to throw it out. 

The recent Supreme Court ruling about affirmative action at Harvard and UNC bears this out.  Alan Jacobs, writing on his blog, does a great job of drawing out how the various opinions and dissents are talking past each other and debating whether Racial inequality is better or worse than it used to be. This is ultimately an outcome-oriented discussion. Jacobs writes, 

Only Roberts, writing for the Court, doesn’t make any such statement, because in his legal reasoning it doesn’t matter. Racial inequality could be better than it used to be, about the same, or worse — it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is whether the policies employed by Harvard and UNC are legally justifiable. That’s his whole argument.2

Do the processes pass legal muster, or should we take their outcomes into account? The question before the court is very specific, but as outcome-oriented creatures, it’s very easy for us to get distracted.

Another area you can see this discussion play out in is free speech. Should we consider the content of speech when deciding if it’s permissible in open forums? I think this lively debate between Sarah Isgur and Jonah Goldberg, which starts with Sarah’s premise that a Supreme Court ruling that Nazis should be allowed to march through a predominantly Jewish town in the United States, is a high point of free speech freedoms in the US, draws out a lot of these points exceptionally well. This is a long debate (only a bit over 25 minutes at 2x speed!), but I think it’s well worth it to grapple with these questions.

The core of the argument again comes down to outcomes. Should speech we don’t like be banned, and who is the we that get’s to determine what that speech is?

Another facet of this is to reflect on how we carry ourselves when a process delivers an outcome we don’t like. There’s a bit of self-reflection that must go on to figure:

• Do we call the whole process corrupt?

• Do we need to tweak the process a bit?

• Is the process sound, and do we just need to be ok with the fact that the process sometimes leads to outcomes we don’t like?

• Do we become whole-hearted defenders of everything the process delivers?

Typically we fall into the first or the last option in public discourse, but there are other options. The rise of extreme identification with political parties further complicates the situation: we flip back and forth depending on who’s party is in charge of the process at the time and react accordingly.

Our innate tendency to focus on outcomes rather than processes has far-reaching implications across business, politics, and free speech. As humans, we desire visible results and often overlook the significance of the underlying processes that shape those outcomes. The adage "Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does" holds, reminding us to critically assess the processes driving the outcomes we seek. Whether in business, politics, or public discourse, we must strive for a nuanced understanding, realizing that sometimes the process needs adjustment.

At the same time, we must accept that outcomes may not always align with our preferences. By broadening our perspective and resisting the temptation to categorize the entire process as flawed or embracing it wholeheartedly, we can engage in more constructive discussions and foster meaningful change in our society.

Social image: Photo by Danil Shostak on Unsplash