I’ll say it again: ICE agents are the least intelligent and least competent men in America. They are too stupid to work normal jobs, and they lack the executive function required to do anything else.

“…sustaining the shared information commons” Compelling essay by Hamilton Mann for @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/the-ai-power...

"In mathematical terms, the relationship is not linear — the first few minutes of patience bring the most gains, as they introduce enough slack in the system to match compatible routes and orders." By Carlo Ratti for @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/62fa...

“So, how far down the scale of complexity does cognition actually go?” By Conor Feehly in @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/the-surprisi...

ICE agents are too unintelligent to hold normal jobs, so they take up this one. Seriously, these are people with IQ’s around 70 or 80. They are too stupid to even know what they are doing. No employer in good standing wants them around and this is where they end up.

"Eventually, I stopped making resolutions altogether... The desire to work on myself never went away. It simply lost its appetite for spectacle. And so, in place of resolutions, I turned toward ritual." Excellent short essay by Suleika Jaouad. open.substack.com/pub/post/p/a...

“A growing ecological movement sees the solution in bioregionalism: the idea of reorganizing social and economic life around the natural boundaries of the ecosystems that host and sustain us.” By @dougbierend.bsky.social for @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/inside-the-p...

Autumn 2025. Village-to-village walks, lake views, risotto, vino, boulders.

We are always at square zero.

“But letting go and—crucially—reengaging with new goals, was found to restore purpose and well-being.” Hugh Riddell, in a story by Molly Glick for @nautil.us nautil.us/the-surprisi...

"The sun delivers more energy to Earth every five days than all known fossil fuel reserves combined. As we shift from using fossilised sunlight to real-time solar power, the challenge is no longer energy capture, but energy storage." ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

Pragmatic essay by drug historian David Herzberg for @nytimes.com (gift link below) “Prohibition has actively made drugs more dangerous. This was not a grand drama of good and evil, but a predictable result of bad policy.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/o...

Minimal's upcoming release prominently features Apple Intelligence's Writing Tools. Preview the powerful new feature on our TestFlight and watch for Minimal 1.22 on the Mac App Store and iOS App Store 🖤 blog.minimal.app/ai-writing-t...

“The social function of criticism is too valuable to lose… the three-way relationship between artists, critics, and audiences must be carefully restored, if we want the 21st century to produce meaningful artistic innovations.” Celine Nguyen, @asteriskmag.bsky.social asteriskmag.com/issues/12-bo...

Are any economists stepping up and implementing the new analytical method for our changing world? I’d love to tune in. This essay is a great first step, and as the author notes, “A new approach is needed.” By @dianecoyle1859.bsky.social for @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/the-critical...

“We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe.“ Impeccable read by @henrywismayer.bsky.social featuring @lukekemp.bsky.social for @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/humanitys-en...

One room, one book. Marioka Shoten is a bookstore in Tokyo. www.takram.com/projects/a-s...

“The same principles that allow us to hunt for alien Earths also allow us to comprehend the biosphere as a planetary phenomenon.” An essay of epic proportions by @miquai.bsky.social for @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/what-searchi...

60 – 30 – 10 – A technique for focusing and optimally allocating effort. Read now on the blog (2-min). blog.minimal.app/60-30-10/

"The challenge is no longer to prove that solid-state batteries are feasible. That has long since been done in any number of labs around the world. The big challenge now is figuring out how to manufacture these devices at scale..." @knowablemag.bsky.social knowablemagazine.org/content/arti...

“As nature transforms from a backdrop for human affairs into an active force shaping them, greater economic value can be produced from its cultivation than from its exploitation” and “Much of nature lies outside the narrow frame of GDP” Tong Wu for @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/investing-in...

“The most effective means of responding to climate change also enhances our physical and economic resilience” and “Technology centralizes power; human-scaled design disperses it“ Brian Stone for @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/the-abundanc...

“Despite covering just 0.2 percent of the sea floor, seagrasses account for an estimated 10 percent of all the carbon stored by the world’s oceans.” @reasonstobecheerful.world reasonstobecheerful.world/seagrass-res...

Let's have three abstraction layers: nature, middle, and human. blog.minimal.app/lets-have-th...

“Liberal democracy’s original genius was not merely the ballot box; it was the creation of multiple forums — town meetings, juries, local councils, civic associations — where citizens encountered each other as equals capable of persuasion and compromise... Cont’d…

“In most large cities cafes need a permit to install an outside terrace, but Sora and others just do what the hell they want. Madness.” (Patrick Tanguay) @inevernu.bsky.social sentiers.media/the-great-er...

"Convincing people that AI is both about to destroy their culture and is also fake does not result in more agency, more universal mediation of collective intelligence, but less." By Benjamin Bratton in @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/is-european-...

“A common refrain among Wikipedians is that the site works in practice but not in theory. It seems to flout everything we’ve learned about human behavior online: anonymous strangers discussing divisive topics and somehow… working together to build something of value” www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

To Overcome Zero-Sum Thinking [in our political crisis]. "A prerequisite to doing good political work is seeing problems as interactive elements." "Objects themselves are practically irrelevant; relationships between objects are everything." minimal.app/pmojaZJJ

“These are not ordinary times: the events that mark them are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction.” @amitav.bsky.social in The Great Derangement, a must read. bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

“Granting the complications and difficulties, the task at hand is to imagine ways forward to that better place.” (Kim Stanley Robinson) communemag.com/dystopias-now/

“Where free time is not used for research — for developing questions, and investigating the answers with an explorer’s spirit — cultural coherence crumbles.” By @marrryooom.bsky.social kasurian.com/p/research-a...

“Worker ants have ceded wings, fertility and all the organs of ‘independent viability’ their ancestors once enjoyed.” www.noemamag.com/are-we-accid... In @noemamag.com by @thomasmoynihan.bsky.social

How many thousand words and not a single mention of “clarity”? www.lux.camera/physicality-...

Phenomenal read on humanism and technology in 2025. > But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

“I find myself slowly changing from an agent of change to an agent of care. I’m less confident in the impact my activism might have on policy than I am about the impact my care may have on other human beings… how they might trickle up to the systems that need changing.”

> “Similar innovations can evolve multiple times independently — a phenomenon known as convergent evolution — and this is seen across life.” www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence...

A language is a map to reality, a survival strategy in a changing world. More languages equals more chances of surviving (and thriving!). > “[A climate-resilient future] … begins with saving indigenous languages, where cultural logic is deeply embedded” theconversation.com/perus-ancien...

Vignette of culture in flux. The nuanced gradient of human language. starkeycomics.com/2023/11/07/m...

www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/s... “The melody is derived from a patient’s vital signs: drums for the heartbeat, guitar for oxygen saturation and piano for blood pressure. When a patient is stable, the tune is harmonious, but it becomes dissonant when a patient’s status changes for the worse...”

fakepixels.substack.com/p/jevons-par... AI/productivity/capitalism/startup bros come full circle, realizing the values that country bumpkins in rural areas the world over — those who have barely left their village and scarcely appear online — have always known.

Thermodynamics and stillness. Activism and choice. Not-knowing and clarity. “When we think we understand the imperatives of the world, we constrain the possibilities for deeper understanding.” “Law-breaking is needed to break the stranglehold of unjust rule” thewalrus.ca/doing-nothin...

Ainu artisans in Hokkaido. Jewelry makers in Japan’s northernmost archipelago. Vivian Morelli with @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/f...

Authenticity. Tighter feedback loop. Facing death, in a nice lively way. Convention/conformity/tradition vs renegadism/first-principles. @mastroianni.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/experime...

Rational thought colliding with the messy complexity of life… and death. www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Nature, designed. Unintuitive preservation tactics. Recursive process. Deliberate complexity. “Trees are complex mountains of microhabitats.” “Only a forest knows how to grow a forest.” “That one died, and yet it’s absolutely full of life.” @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/how-to-build...

This is the most beautiful planet we have. We should take excellent care of it.