Last week, I established that wisdom cannot be accumulated. It must be traversed. This week: what traversal actually requires, and why AI cannot complete it.

In early 2026, researchers added an important wrinkle to what had been a fairly damning picture of AI’s effect on human reasoning.

Water scarcity is not a future threat. It is here now. Remember the Survival Rule of Threes: death is the likely result of three minutes without air, three hours without shelter (in extreme conditions), three days without water, and three weeks without food. Four billion people, more than half th...

There is a particular kind of friendship that only makes sense to people who have it. It doesn’t require regular contact, shared geography, or even similar lives. It requires a shared past that was formative enough that no amount of intervening time can entirely dissolve it.

I played Doom. Almost obsessively. For nearly two years (1995 to 1997), my colleagues and I would wrap up long days on a construction site in Connecticut and disappear into networked deathmatches for a couple of hours or more (please don’t judge). It was, in the best possible way, a complete wast...