history

  The Four-Day Mirage: Why Working Less Makes Us Better Machines For centuries, the church, the state, and the factory floor have operated o...

  The Bureaucratic Buddha: How to Master Zen Without Quitting Your Day Job Humanity has spent millennia retreating to remote mountain monast...

  The Phantom Bureaucracy: Why Your Boss Has No Idea What Actually wastes Your Time Humanity has spent centuries inventing elaborate corpora...

  The Cult of the Spreadsheet: Why Doing the Wrong Thing Faster is Modern Management’s Favorite Trap Humanity has spent centuries worshippin...

  The Efficiency Trap: Why We Build Towers of Paper We have a habit of confusing speed with progress. For over a century, we have been haunt...

  The Efficiency Trap: Government Borrowing and the Cannibalization of Enterprise In the ledger of modern governance, hope is not a strategy...

  The Productivity Trap: Why We Read to Escape, and Why We Read to Grind Walk into any bookstore in Taiwan, and you are immediately confront...

  The iPad Rebellion: The Unbearable Heaviness of Being a Subway Driver In a world where the average worker is lucky to scrape together a li...

  The Serendipity of Being Useless: Why Genius Needs a Playground In 1947, Richard Feynman was at a nadir. His wife had recently passed, the...

  The Cult of the Grind: Why More Hours Mean Less Value Look at the OECD data, and you’ll see the modern world’s strange obsession with the ...

  The Anesthetic of Ambition: Has Silicon Valley Lost its Edge? In recent years, a new status symbol has emerged among the global elite. It ...

  The Math of Human Nature: Why Equality Is the Death of Effort There is a charming, almost naive arrogance in the belief that we can legisl...

  The Dependency Trap: Why Wales is Consuming Its Own Future There is a grim irony in the fiscal state of Wales today. With public spending ...

  The Ancient Art of "Printing" Luxury: Why Real Wealth is Never Paper Long before the Federal Reserve mastered the art of quantit...

  The Myth of the Fixed Pie: Why Marx and the Bosses Are Both Wrong We love the Marxian drama. It is the ultimate human story: the cold-hear...

  The Biology of the Sigh: Rewiring Your Nervous System in Real Time Chronic stress is the wallpaper of modern life. It isn’t a singular, ex...

  The Welsh Welfare Trap: Paying for the Privilege of Decay In the biological world, a parasite that consumes more than half of its host’s e...

  The British Tax Illusion: Death by a Thousand Papercuts The British state is a master of the "invisibility cloak." We like to te...

  The Tax Trap: How the State Domesticates the High-Achiever In the grand savanna of human history, the "alpha" was rewarded for t...

  The Cult of the Empty Chair: Why Staying Late is a Biological Dead End In the modern corporate office, we witness a bizarre ritual that wo...