Hi friends,

Greetings from Mexico!

I‘m down here for a wedding, where I’m also finding some time to write on the beach. Yesterday, I finished an long-form essay about commitment that should go live next week.

Here's what I want to share this week:

​Thoughts on Montreal: Reflections from my recent trip to Montreal, with a focus on architecture, economics, and the mafia.

​Never-Ending Now: The most popular mini-essay I've ever published. In it, I show how the Internet traps us in a perpetual present, which blinds us to history and makes life more chaotic than it needs to be.

​How to Be a Minimalist Entrepreneur with Sahil Lavingia: ​Sahil is the founder & CEO of Gumroad, and recently published a book about starting companies in the Internet age. In this interview, we discussed his writing process for the book and how he’s built such a loyal online audience.

Today's Finds

​Mechanical Paradise: How did the machine transform human consciousness? At first, the Eiffel Tower promised unlimited control over the world. Standing at the top made humans feel like birds and, by extension, guardians of the future. The view from the top was as breathtaking as the sight of the Earth from the moon almost 80 years later. Around that time, Ford rolled out the car, Edison invented sound recording, and Einstein invented the Theory of Relativity — the basis of the largest change in humanity's view of the universe since Newton. As this documentary shows, the perspective shift is most evident in the art of the age. Specifically, in two shifts: one from nature to machine, and another from impressionism to cubism.

​The Moral Equivalent of War: An 1906 essay from William James where he argues society needs a way to re-create the strengthening, hardening, and uniting factors that war provides. Without a "moral equivalent of war," our society will degenerate. The essay inspired a number of American service programs like the Peace Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps. If you resonate with the essay, I recommend Tribe by Sebastian Junger.

​Interview with Patrick Collison: Of all the Silicon Valley CEOs, Patrick is the one I admire most. This interview is a whirlwind through his interests: biology, online business, technological progress, aviation, funding scientific research, energy, and culture. I don't remember the last time I learned about so many new ideas in one sitting — such a fun read.

​Where are the Thought Police: Why are people in Democratic countries expected to have an educated opinion on so many policy matters, from abortion to foreign policy? Here, Johnathan Bi argues that it's downstream of our political structure. Since people in a Democracy are theoretically in charge, they should have strong opinions about how a society should be structured. But there are tradeoffs, such as the politicization of social life and, counterintuitively, the suppression of free speech in the private sphere. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that bottom-up thought control is more pervasive than the top-down alternative because even the mightiest of monarchs don't have the power to police the average person's speech. No society can ever escape the political and achieve unlimited freedom of thought. But the organization of a society will determine what kinds of thought control exist.

​Why Winners Keep Winning: Our social universe has very few rules. But if I had to pick an iron law, it's that winners keep winning. We've known this since the New Testament. Specifically, the book of Luke says: "I tell you, that to every one who has will more be given; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." Here, we have empirical evidence from Stephen King and JK Rowling. Outside the world of writing, this article shows how a small financial advantage at the beginning of your career can lead to outsized gains over time.