How Stoicism replaced self-help; who killed culture — and how; and why AI is not a bubble, but a wildfire. Plus Halldór Berg Harðarson and Ian Curtiss on what Iceland can learn from China and vice versa.
From around the web
1. The seven habits of highly defeated people
Is there anything more American than the sunnily optimistic self-help book? Probably not, but even those seem to be going extinct. In The Drift, historian Erik Baker critiques the new genre replacing the old: “self-help philosophy” books that teach acceptance of failure and limitations. In some ways, books like Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” may be a necessary corrective to toxic positivity. But they ultimately encourage political disengagement by teaching people to accept rather than challenge the structural forces causing their suffering.
While an exaggerated sense of our own importance is a recipe for both political and psychological disaster, it is also possible to overestimate our insignificance. Acceptance shades easily into excuse. With enough practice tolerating imperfection you can learn to forget what it is you’re failing to live up to. When those expectations include owning a vacation home or winning a Nobel Prize, letting go might be healthy — but doing so is tragic when they include stopping a genocide or ending homelessness.
2. Without a Voice
Whatever the consequences of our newfound Stoicism, it was perhaps impossible to sustain optimism in a culture that feels so stagnant. Celine Nguyen looks at the issue through the lens of cultural criticism. The problem isn’t that today’s artists lack talent, she writes in Asterisk, but that professional criticism has collapsed — exemplified by the demise of institutions like the Village Voice. The solution isn’t nostalgic revival of the past but recognizing that vibrant artistic cultures require a “critical mass” of people—not just professional critics—actively engaging with, critiquing, and championing new work.
What would it take for web-based art to become a significant art movement? For more people, I think, to pay attention to these works, write about them, and contextualize them in existing cultural narratives. To take part in making them, and to participate in critiquing them — pushing both artists and audiences to expect more. These are new forms; they need their critics and audiences. (“An audience with a high level of connoisseurship,” Fran Lebowitz once said, “is as important to the culture as artists.”) Here I’m reminded of a proposition from the art professor and critic Alex Kitnick, who, at a March event hosted by the arts criticism website 4Columns, quoted a work by the poet David Antin on the New York art world of the 1960s:
There were millions of people all around and most of them seem to have been artists of some sort or another … artists went to see each other’s work and we were all very excited with everything we were doing and we were all doing everything … and everybody was an art critic … all artists were art critics.
3. Controlled burn
Something more frothy than cultural creation (and perhaps one reason some artistic expression feels so flat) is AI. But most signs point to precariousness there, too. Entrepreneur offers a useful framing of what’s in store: AI isn’t experiencing a traditional bubble but rather a “wildfire” — a necessary correction that will clear out weak startups while leaving infrastructure and talent for stronger companies to absorb. His key insight is that productive wildfires destroy paper value but create durable infrastructure — and companies that can prove unit economics and genuine customer value now will dominate once capital becomes scarce.
This creates a dangerous feedback loop. Each massive spending announcement forces competitors to spend more, which drives up the perceived stakes, which justifies even larger commitments. No executive wants to be the one who underinvested in the defining technology of the era. The cost of being wrong by spending too little feels existential; the cost of being wrong by spending too much feels like someone else’s problem — a future quarter’s write-down, not today’s strategic failure.
It’s precisely this dynamic that creates productive bubbles. The rational individual decision (match your competitor’s investment) produces an irrational collective outcome (vast overcapacity). But that overcapacity is what seeds the next forest.
4. Hot takes, cooler data
Another reframing: In , Ted Nordhaus offers a corrective to today’s climate discourse in line with last week’s recommended reading from Bill Gates. It is time, he says, to revise downward our views on climate risk. Worst-case warming projections have dropped from 5°C to 3°C, and climate-related deaths have plummeted despite 1.5°C of warming. Ted argues that progressives cling to catastrophism due to social pressure, professional incentives, and the belief that only existential fear can justify rapid energy transformation, creating an insular discourse that misrepresents climate science just as badly as climate skeptics do.
Despite close to a degree and a half of warming over the last century or so, global mortality from climate and weather extremes has fallen by a factor of 25 or more on a per capita basis. As Pielke documented recently, the world is on track this year for what is almost certainly the lowest level of climate related mortality in recorded human history, not only on a per capita basis but on an absolute basis as well. The economic costs of climate extremes continue to rise, but this is almost entirely due to affluence, population growth, and the migration of global populations towards climate hazards, mainly cities that tend to be located in coastal regions and flood plains.
5. At gunpoint
On a different note, Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, a private equity billionaire, is driving Pentagon procurement reform with intense scrutiny of both old defense contractors and new venture-backed startups. While there’s bipartisan consensus that defense acquisition needs modernization, Feinberg’s cautious PE approach clashes with the risk-taking VC culture of Silicon Valley defense firms, creating tension as he centralizes control and demands proof that startups can deliver in actual combat environments.
Fixing problems like these was, after all, the logic of bringing in a private equity guy: He spent his career finding value inside rusty old companies like Safeway, ruthlessly reorganizing and purging them, and selling leaner and more effective versions of them back to the public markets. Cerberus was known for its discipline — squeezing out nickels where it could — and, famously, for dodging a bullet when it dropped out of the bidding for the real estate company Equity Office in 2007, just before the crash.
Now, Feinberg is applying that logic to a $300 billion-plus defense industry with, effectively, a single major customer: the US government.
6. Tour de force
Finally, what’s better than a human? A human with a bicycle (not a joke). We’re typically inefficient walkers because we must constantly fight gravity with each step. Bicycles transform us into some of the world’s most highly energy-efficient travelers, making locomotion on land more like swimming—where animals glide efficiently through water. H/t scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman.
