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We only hate beauty contests because they remind us we are contestants too, and most of us would not make semifinals. That is the real sting. Not that a few women walk a stage in sequins, but that an entire civilization watches a crude, fluorescent version of its own sorting algorithm and feels seen. So we do what we always do with uncomfortable mirrors. We call them backward, sexist, trivial. We announce that women must be liberated from them, as if the contestants were hostages rather than adults doing risk-reward math in public....

Democratic erosion is not random. It follows a familiar pattern, and we are already on the path. The details differ by country and era, but the sequence is boringly consistent: first you get “free-ish,” then you start paying in loyalty and silence, and eventually the history books get rewritten to make the whole thing look tidy. The rhythm shows up in literature because writers pay attention to systems under stress. It shows up in today’s headlines because institutions are easier to weaken than to rebuild....

America’s pullback from the world is not a clever strategy to conserve strength. It is a symptom of an internal systems failure: a country that cannot agree on what it is for will struggle to decide what it is for in the world. The United States has done this kind of reset before. After World War I it turned inward, then rebuilt an outward posture by World War II. The difference today is that the internal argument is less about policy and more about identity....

If you care about good ideas, you should probably be less aggressive about chasing them. Not inert, not apathetic, just slower and more deliberate than the current culture encourages. Most “new” insights are old patterns resurfacing in a different environment. Knowledge behaves less like a linear staircase and more like a looping trail system. Paths get overgrown, then cleared, sometimes burned and rebuilt. The mistake is not that we revisit the same ground....

If you want a single rule for modern life, here is an honest one: treat stupidity as a system failure, not a personality quirk. The threat is not low IQ. The threat is people with perfectly good brains switching them off, outsourcing judgment to a crowd or a feed, and then acting with full confidence. That pattern scales, travels fast, and is hard to unwind once it hardens into “how we do things....

The pendulum swings, and middle management once again finds itself scapegoated in the grand flattening experiment. Elon Musk rails against “managers managing managers”; Mark Zuckerberg dismisses them as bureaucratic bloat; even Satya Nadella tips his hat to “leaner” teams. The message is straightforward: snip the middle, slash the overhead, and efficiency will set you free. It’s a catchy mantra, but history—being the patient teacher it is—reminds us that the middle doesn’t just vanish; it bounces back....

Inductive reasoning sits at the center of social policy. We cannot avoid it, and it is unreliable by design, so the real job is to manage its failure modes, not pretend we can live without it. We live in a world of partial data and time pressure. Laws still need to be written, budgets allocated, programs designed. That means someone will always be generalizing from limited examples, trends, and noisy measurements....

If you want people to behave well, rating them looks like an efficient shortcut. In practice, rating humans with five little stars mostly builds a thin layer of anxiety on top of already messy systems. And things become dystopian’ish fast. The core problem is simple: we try to compress complex behavior, unequal power, and shifting moods into a single metric, then pretend it is neutral. That is good for dashboards, bad for dignity....

How far we’ve come We’ve come a long way in User Experience (UX) design. We’ve moved from just making things work to creating experiences that truly connect (with) people. But we’ve also been guilty of shortcuts and mis-applying heuristics like “reducing cognitive load” or “creating frictionless experiences” just because they sound cool. As digital experiences evolve (likely to become LESS noticably digital yet MORE impactful), we need to rethink our approaches and smoke out well meaning yet counter-productive UX design thinking patterns....

Portuguese Saudade: A profound, melancholic longing for someone or something absent, with the knowledge that they may never return. Fado: A music genre that expresses deep feelings of loss, longing, and melancholy, often seen as the musical embodiment of saudade. Desenrascanço: The ability to artfully disentangle oneself from a difficult situation, often through creativity and resourcefulness. Nguni Bantu Ubuntu: “I am because we are.” A philosophy that emphasizes community, connection, and mutual support, highlighting the shared bonds of humanity....