NYTimes: “[Michael] Pollan, a professor of science and environmental journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-founder of the Center for the Science of Psychedelics, has written many well-received books about food, plants and mind-altering drugs — but here he takes on a new challenge. He confronts questions about the mind not as a neuroscience expert, but as an explorer, interviewing dozens of leading voices in science and proffering a rich survey of thinking in the field. Pollan writes: “My hope is that this book smudges the windowpane of your own consciousness and serves as a tool to help you fully appreciate the everyday miracle that a world appears when you open your eyes — a world and so much else, including you, a self.””
Paul Graham: “The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you’re smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there’s no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you’ll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they’ll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.”
Jack Dorsey: “Something really shifted in December in the sophistication of [AI] tools. Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s Codex 5.3 went from being really good at greenfield products to being really good at larger and larger code bases. It presented an option to dramatically change how any company is structured, and certainly ours. We have to rethink how companies run, how they’re structured, how they’re built. It has to be closer to building the company as an intelligence.”
Sven Beckert: “The emergence and the spread of capitalism is the most important process that has unfolded on planet Earth in the past 500 years…Today, we live in a world where we are surrounded by capitalism. We live in capitalism like fish live in water. It’s everywhere. It determines how we work. It determines how our cities are being built. It has an impact on the international relations between states. It also affects the most intimate aspects of our lives. It’s so overwhelmingly present that it’s hard to see that this is a revolutionary departure from prior human history. “
