Categories
News Writing

A Tribute to John F. Burns

“The commitment to fairness and balance and to shunning conventional truths when our reporting leads us in unexpected directions has been our gold standard.” — John F. Burns

As I’ve gotten older I pay closer attention to the obituary section of the New York Times. It frequently teaches me and brings back unusual memories that surprise me. Today it was my memory of years of reading the writings of John Burns brought back to life as I read his obituary.

Burns retired over ten years ago. I now remember thinking at the time just what a loss that would be for the paper. Reading Alan Cowell’s obituary of John F. Burns this morning, I felt that absence acutely.

For years, Burns was my first read—a “fireman” of the foreign desk who didn’t just report on the heat; he translated the embers.

Burns belonged to an era of journalism that felt more like a literary calling than a content cycle. He was a man who could find the “sweep of history” in the “telling detail of the present.”

Who else would think to frame the harrowing siege of Sarajevo through the haunting notes of a cellist playing Albinoni’s Adagio amidst the rubble? He understood that to explain a war, you must first explain the soul of the city being broken by it.

His career was a map of the 20th and 21st centuries’ most jagged edges—from the “wasteland of blasted mosques” in Bosnia to the “harrowing regime” of the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan.

Yet, for all his Pulitzers and his debonair appearances in a Burberry raincoat on Red Square, there was a refreshing, stubborn humility to his craft.

He famously tilted against the “missionary complex” of modern reporting. He didn’t want to save the world; he wanted to see it—clearly, fairly, and without the blinding influence of ideology.

There is something deeply moving about his partnership with his wife, Jane Scott-Long which wasn’t familiar to me. While John was the “full force of talent” at the keyboard, Jane was the architect of safety, turning run-down Baghdad houses into fortified sanctuaries with “military-style blast walls” and, perhaps most essentially, a state-of-the-art coffee machine. They were a team that survived the “chaos of war” by creating a small, civilized center within it.

In his later years after she passed, Burns became more reclusive, a quiet departure for a man once known as a “raconteur with panache.” It’s a transition that mirrors the profession itself. He flourished in a pre-internet era, where time-zone differentials allowed for “considered writing.” Today, the “blue pencil” of the editor has been replaced by the instant, unvetted roar of the social feed.

His final story for the Times was about the reburial of King Richard III. It was a fitting end: a story about the “sweep of the centuries” propelling the news of the day.

As I reflect back on his work and my years of reading it, I realize that what I miss isn’t just the news he delivered. I miss the way he delivered it—with the patience of a historian and the heart of a poet. He kept the paper straight, and in doing so, he helped us keep our bearings in a world that so often feels lost. Especially today.

Categories
Creativity Writing

The Crucible of the Blank Page

There is a distinct, often uncomfortable silence that accompanies a blank page. It’s not a lack of noise, but rather an overwhelming cacophony of unformed ideas waiting to be given shape.

We often operate under the assumption that we must have our thoughts perfectly ordered before we sit down to express them. We believe writing is merely the act of transcribing a fully formed philosophy from mind to paper.

But the truth is far messier, and infinitely more profound.

Flannery O’Connor captured this beautifully when she admitted:

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

I find myself returning to this admission constantly, deeply resonating with the reality of it. I’m the same way.

The human mind is a brilliant but chaotic place, a swirling ether of impressions, emotions, half-remembered conversations, and half-baked theories. Left to its own devices, it rarely settles on a singular, coherent truth. It requires the friction of articulation—the physical, deliberate act of putting words into a sequence—to force those nebulous clouds into something solid.

In an era increasingly defined by the allure of frictionless output, there is a profound temptation to skip this wrestling match.

We are surrounded by tools and shortcuts designed to hand us the finished essay, the polished insight, the perfectly packaged takeaway without us having to endure the messy, chaotic energy of the drafting process. It is easy to look at the blank page as a hurdle to be cleared rather than a necessary landscape to be traversed. But bypassing that struggle is a critical mistake.

You cannot skip the work of wrestling with ideas. That struggle is not a barrier to good writing; it is the core chaotic energy that underpins it. It is the crucible where conviction is forged.

When you wrestle with a sentence, striking it out, rewriting it, abandoning it entirely for a new thought, you are not just editing text on a screen. You are editing your own mind. You are testing the structural integrity of your beliefs.

The chaotic energy of a rough draft—the fragmented sentences, the sudden leaps of logic, the tangents that seem to lead nowhere—is evidence of a mind actively searching for meaning.

It is through this very friction that we discover what we actually believe.

An idea might feel profound when it is floating weightlessly in your head, but the moment you try to pin it down with language, its flaws and hollow points become glaringly obvious. Writing forces a confrontation with our own intellectual blind spots.

If we outsource this process, or if we try to circumvent the chaos by relying on templates or taking the path of least cognitive resistance, we lose the very mechanism by which we come to know ourselves. We might successfully produce text, but we will not produce insight.

The value of writing isn’t just in the final product meant for a reader’s eyes; it is in the transformation that occurs within the writer.

To write is to step into the unknown spaces of your own intellect. It is an act of revelation as much as communication.

So, the next time you find yourself staring at a blank page, feeling the chaotic energy of unformed thoughts, don’t retreat.

Lean into the mess. Let the words spill out, rough and unpolished, and trust that in the wreckage of your early drafts, you will finally read what you say, and in doing so, discover exactly what you think.

Categories
AI

Beyond the Summary: Using AI to Find the “Friction” in Your Thinking

We’ve reached the “Summary Plateau.”

You see it everywhere. Every browser extension, every note-taking app, and every enterprise LLM now offers a “Summarize” button. It’s the ultimate promise of the efficiency era: Give us the 2,000-word essay, and we’ll give you the three bullet points. But there’s a hidden tax on this kind of efficiency. When we ask an AI to summarize, we are asking it to smooth out the edges. We are asking it to remove the “noise.” The problem is, in the world of ideas, the noise is often where the signal lives. The friction—the parts of an argument that make us uncomfortable or that we don’t quite understand—is where the actual learning happens.

If we only consume the summaries, we aren’t thinking; we’re just acknowledging.

The Mirror, Not the Maker

I’ve been experimenting with a different approach. Instead of asking the model to make the content shorter, I’ve been asking it to make my engagement with the content harder.

I don’t want a “Maker” to write my thoughts for me. I want a “Mirror” to show me where my thoughts are thin.

When I’m wrestling with a complex piece—perhaps a deep dive on the future of venture capital or a philosophical treatise on Arete—I’ve stopped clicking “summarize.” Instead, I feed the text into the LLM and use these “Friction Prompts” to find the sand in the gears:

The Essential Toolkit

  • The “Steel Man” Challenge: “I am inclined to agree with this author’s conclusion. Find the three strongest counter-arguments that this text ignores, and explain why a reasonable person would hold them.”
  • The “Recursive Logic” Audit: “Identify the three most critical ‘logical leaps’ the author makes—points where a conclusion is reached without sufficient evidence. If those leaps are wrong, how does the entire argument collapse?”
  • The “Blind Spot” Audit: “What are the underlying cultural or economic assumptions this author is making that they haven’t explicitly stated?”
  • The “Cross-Pollination” Filter: “Connect the central thesis of this article to a seemingly unrelated field (e.g., Stoic philosophy or biological ecosystems). How does the logic of this text hold up—or fail—when applied to that different domain?”
  • The “Analog Translation” Test: “If I had to explain the core mechanism of this abstract concept using only physical, analog metaphors (like plumbing or woodworking), how would I do it? Where does the metaphor break down?”
  • The “Socratic Sharpening”: “Don’t summarize this. Instead, ask me three probing questions that force me to apply the core logic of this essay to a completely different industry.”

Sharpening the Blade

Summary is about completion (getting it done). Friction is about cognition (getting it right).

When the AI points out a blind spot in an article I loved, it creates a moment of cognitive dissonance. That “click” of discomfort is the sound of a mental model being updated. It’s the digital equivalent of using a whetstone on a blade—you need the friction to get the edge.

As we move further into this age of “Flash-Frozen Cognition,” the temptation to automate our understanding will only grow. But discernment—that uniquely human trait we’ve discussed here before—cannot be outsourced to a bulleted list.

The next time you’re faced with a daunting PDF or a dense long-read, resist the “Summarize” button. Ask the machine to challenge you instead. You might find that the most valuable thing the AI can give you isn’t an answer, but a better version of your own question.

A Deep Dive (Further Reading from the Archive)

If you resonated with this piece on cultivating discernment, you might find these earlier synthesis experiments worth a revisit:

  • On Flash-Frozen Cognition: A foundational post discussing how LLMs are freezing the current consensus, and how we must resist it.
  • The Harvest and the Algorithm: Comparing 1920s ice harvesting to 2020s cognition—the critical shift from scarcity to abundance.
  • The Arete of Attention: A look at the Stoic concept of virtue as the intentional direction of our most scarce resource: focus.
  • Longhand Thinking: Why the physical act of writing is the ultimate antidote to digital velocity.
Categories
AI Programming Work

The Currency of Restlessness

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes from watching a machine effortlessly perform your life’s work. For Aditya Agarwal, an early Facebook engineer and former CTO of Dropbox, that vertigo hit after a weekend of coding with an AI assistant. His realization was absolute: we will never write code by hand again.

When the specialized skills we have spent decades mastering become free and abundant, the foundation of our professional identity inevitably trembles. Agarwal captures the duality of this moment perfectly, describing it as a mixture of “wonder with a profound sadness.”

“There’s something deeply disorienting about watching the pillars of your professional identity, what you built and how you built it, get reproduced in a weekend by a tool that doesn’t need to eat or sleep.”

The conversation around AI tends to flatten this emotional reality into two distinct camps: the doomers who foresee total replacement, and the boosters who promise a frictionless utopia.

But lived experience is messier. We are capable of holding grief and wonder in the same hand.

We can mourn the craftsmen we were, even as we sprint toward the architects we are about to become.

Because here is the secret about the disorientation of progress: it passes.

Once the initial shock fades, what replaces it is a wild, unconstrained energy.

When the mechanical friction of creation vanishes—when a week’s worth of coding can be accomplished in an afternoon—the scope of our ambition expands. We are no longer limited by the keystrokes we can manage in a day, but by the edges of our imagination. We aren’t watching ourselves become obsolete; we are watching our lifelong constraints dissolve.

This shift is rewriting the social contract of knowledge work, starting with how we evaluate human potential. For decades, the corporate world has relied on a calcified heuristic for hiring: brand-name universities, FAANG experience, and years of tenure. We worshipped the resume.

Now, that playbook is breaking down. In evaluating engineers and founders navigating this transition, Agarwal notes that traditional pedigrees predict almost nothing about a person’s ability to thrive. The new dividing line isn’t generational, and it certainly isn’t educational. It is entirely dispositional.

“The trait that matters most isn’t intelligence, or credentials or years of experience. It’s someone’s relationship with change—not whether they’ve seen change before, but whether they run toward it.”

The new currency of the working world is restlessness.

Restlessness is the refusal to settle into the comfort of the way things used to be. It is the constitution of a builder who cannot stop tinkering, who treats every new AI tool as a puzzle to be solved before the day is out. In an economy where the “how” of knowledge work is increasingly automated, the premium shifts entirely to adaptability, curiosity, and vision.

This democratization of capability forces a deeply uncomfortable, deeply human reckoning. We have to let go of the identities we forged under old paradigms to become whatever comes next.

The technology didn’t create this human challenge—it merely made it impossible to ignore.

Categories
Apple

The MacBook Neo

Reading the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the new MacBook Neo I am reminded of this from the recent book Apple in China:

“Engineers said the pressure to put in the long hours was all but mandatory. Indeed, a decade later after Jobs created Apple University, a corporate institution meant to convey his values to a new generation of employees, Apple came close to codifying the principle that pushing employees to burnout was acceptable.

In a slide deck called Leadership Palette, Apple states: “Fighting for excellence is about resisting the gravitational pull of mediocrity. It involves being dead tired and still pushing yourself, and others, to get it right, every time.”” (Patrick McGee, Apple in China)

Categories
Aging Citizens Band Radio History Living

The Static We Left Behind

There was a time when the airwaves crackled with a distinct, unpolished kind of magic. It wasn’t the curated broadcast of a corporate radio station, but the raw, spontaneous voices of strangers sharing the same lonely stretch of highway or suburban night. When I previously wrote about the rise and decline of CB radio, I didn’t fully anticipate how deeply the piece would resonate. The influx of emails, comments, and shared memories pointed to a singular, striking truth: we don’t just miss the hardware of the 1970s; we miss the serendipity of the connection it offered.

In the decades since the fiberglass whip antenna faded from the American automotive silhouette, our society has become infinitely more “connected.” We carry glass slabs in our pockets capable of reaching anyone, anywhere, in an instant. Yet, paradoxically, we often find ourselves feeling more profoundly isolated. The modern digital landscape is largely an algorithmic echo chamber, meticulously designed to feed us reflections of what we already know and who we already are.

CB radio, by contrast, was a geographic lottery. You turned the dial, adjusted the squelch, and were instantly thrust into a transient community composed entirely of whoever happened to be within your physical radius. It was messy, chaotic, occasionally absurd, and deeply human. It was a localized town square operating on a 27 MHz frequency.

“We traded the spontaneous for the scheduled. We swapped the local for the global… We traded the crackle of static for the endless, frictionless scroll of the feed.”

Reflecting on the quiet that eventually fell over Channel 19, it becomes clear that the decline of CB radio was more than just a technological shift—it was a cultural one. We traded the spontaneous for the scheduled. We swapped the local for the global, and the intimately anonymous for the hyper-public. We traded the crackle of static for the endless, frictionless scroll of the feed.

But the fundamental human impulse that fueled the CB craze never actually disappeared. The desire to reach out into the dark void and hear a human voice echo back—the spirit of “Breaker 1-9, is anyone out there?”—remains hardwired into our psychology. We see fragmented echoes of it today in late-night Reddit threads, in niche Discord servers, and in the fleeting, unscripted interactions of multiplayer gaming. We are all still, in our own ways, searching for a shared frequency.

Perhaps the true legacy of the CB radio isn’t a cautionary tale of obsolescence, but a gentle reminder. It reminds us that in our highly polished, curated digital world, there is still immense, undeniable value in the unscripted encounter. We haven’t lost the need to connect; we are simply navigating a world with too much noise and too few open channels.

Categories
Authors Storytelling Writing

The Architecture of Resonance

There’s a particular kind of madness that strikes writers late at night, or in the stagnant hours of mid-afternoon, when you find yourself staring at a single sentence for twenty minutes.

You’re weighing a semicolon against an em dash. You’re wondering if “murmur” is too soft or if “whisper” is too cliché. All of this while knowing, with complete certainty, that no reader will ever stop to appreciate this specific choice. They’ll just read the sentence and move on.

So why do we do it?

In Draft No. 4, John McPhee — the legendary literary journalist who spent decades at The New Yorker — shares a principle he still writes on the blackboard at Princeton. It’s actually a quote from Cary Grant: “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” The implication, McPhee explains, is that almost no individual detail is essential, while the details as a whole are absolutely essential.

I find this idea endlessly useful. And a little reassuring.

Think about walking into a beautifully designed home. You don’t notice the precise angle of the crown molding or the specific undertones of the paint. You don’t walk in and say, “Ah yes, Alabaster White.” You just feel warmth, or elegance, or comfort. The impression is singular — but it’s entirely built from a thousand invisible decisions someone made before you arrived.

Writing works the same way. The rhythm of your sentences, the specificity of your verbs, the way a paragraph ends — these are the details. Individually, they’re expendable. Swap “murmur” for “whisper” and the piece survives. Delete the semicolon and the world keeps turning.

But collectively, they are the piece.

Start compromising — reach for the easy cliché, let a clunky transition slide, settle for vague where you could be specific — and the foundation slowly rots. The reader won’t be able to name the moment they lost interest. They’ll just close the tab. The impression shifts from resonant to flat, without anyone quite knowing why.

Writing, then, is an act of quiet faith. It asks you to labor over things no one will applaud. Nobody claps for an em dash. But the work isn’t really for applause — it’s out of respect for the whole.

We curate a thousand invisible things so the reader can feel one visible truth.

So the next time you’re agonizing over a single word at midnight, remember: you’re not just picking a word. You’re placing a tile in a mosaic. Cary Grant understood it. McPhee put it on a blackboard. You might as well make it count.

Categories
Health medical

The Screen Between Us: How Data Eclipsed the Art of Healing

We often think of medicine as an intimate dance between two human beings—one seeking solace, the other offering expertise and care. For centuries, the physician’s most powerful tools weren’t just pills or scalpels, but their profound presence. It was the careful listening, the observational gaze, and the reassuring touch. Today, however, a glowing rectangular barrier has been erected right in the center of the examination room.

In our relentless pursuit to optimize and quantify healthcare, we inadvertently changed the very nature of the profession. As Dr. Robert Wachter observes in A Giant Leap, the introduction of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) transformed the physician’s daily life:

“In short, the job of being a physician was transformed by the electronic health record—and not for the better. Doctors found that they were spending half their day staring at their EHR and clicking through screens, nearly double the time they spent with their patients. Physician burnout reached alarming levels in 2022, with more than half of American doctors experiencing symptoms of exhaustion and detachment. EHR documentation was a key factor, significantly diminishing both wellbeing and career satisfaction.”

We digitized medicine to make it efficient, to prevent errors, and to capture vital data. Those were, and still are, noble goals. But in our rush to catalog the patient, we inadvertently turned the healer into a data entry clerk. The cost of this digital optimization is the soul of the medical practice.

When more than half of American doctors report symptoms of exhaustion and detachment, we cease facing a mere administrative hurdle; we begin witnessing a systemic crisis of spirit. Physician burnout is rarely just about working too many hours. It is, more often, a deep moral injury. It occurs when a professional is systematically prevented from doing the very work that gives their calling its meaning. Doctors endured grueling years of medical school to heal people, to connect, and to solve complex biological puzzles—not to feed a ravenous digital ledger.

The EHR was supposed to be a tool that served the physician, a modern augmentation of their capabilities. Instead, the physician has become the tool that feeds the EHR. The documentation demands have significantly diminished career satisfaction and personal wellbeing because they sever the foundational human connection that makes the practice of medicine bearable during its darkest hours.

We are at a critical juncture. The technology itself is not inherently evil, but its current implementation is failing the very people it was built to empower. We must reimagine medical technology not as a master that demands a constant tribute of keystrokes, but as a silent, invisible servant. Until we restore the primacy of the doctor-patient relationship—until the screen is pushed aside and unhurried eye contact is restored—the exhaustion will persist. Medicine is, at its core, a deeply human endeavor. It is time we step out from behind the screen and let the healers return to healing.

Categories
Business Living

From Know-It-All to Learn-It-All

Momentum is a strange phenomenon. In physics, it is simply mass times velocity. But in human organizations, it is tradition multiplied by ego. When a ship reaches a certain size, its sheer mass resists any change in direction. Microsoft, a little over a decade ago, was the ultimate corporate supertanker. It was massively successful, incredibly profitable, and dangerously stagnant.

When Satya Nadella took the helm, he inherited a culture defined by its own historic brilliance. They were the smartest people in the room, and they knew it. But in a world moving faster than anyone could comprehend, being the smartest person in the room quickly becomes a liability. It creates a defensive posture. You spend your energy protecting your status and proving your intelligence rather than exploring the horizon.

As the observation goes, Nadella had to turn this bigger ship. His mechanism for doing so wasn’t a massive restructuring or a ruthless wave of firings; it was beautifully, disarmingly simple. He told his organization that they were going to make a fundamental, psychological shift.

“We’re gonna go from being a know-it-all to a learn-it-all culture.”

This isn’t just a corporate soundbite; it’s a profound philosophical pivot. The “know-it-all” operates from a place of fragility and fear. If your identity is built on knowing everything, any new information that contradicts your worldview is a threat that must be neutralized. A “learn-it-all,” however, operates from a place of abundance and curiosity. Contradictions aren’t threats; they are invitations to expand.

Looking inward, it is striking how easily we slip into a “know-it-all” posture in our own lives. Competence is deeply comfortable. When we get good at our jobs, our daily routines, or navigating our relationships, we build a fortress of certainty around ourselves. We stop asking questions because we assume we’ve already mapped the territory. We begin to ossify.

To adopt a learn-it-all mindset requires something deeply uncomfortable: vulnerability. It means walking into a room and quietly accepting that you might be wrong. It means replacing the urge to provide a quick, authoritative answer with the patience to ask a better question. It means letting go of the ego’s demand to be the expert.

The turnaround of Microsoft wasn’t just about a pivot to cloud computing or new product pipelines. It was a quiet victory of humility over arrogance. It was the realization that in an ever-changing world, the ultimate advantage isn’t what you already know, but how fast—and how willingly—you are prepared to learn.

We are all steering our own ships through shifting waters. The moment we decide we have nothing left to learn is the exact moment we begin to sink.

Categories
Investing Living

The Lonely Quadrant: Why the Crowd Never Outperforms

There is a profound comfort in the consensus. When we agree with the crowd, we are protected by a shared canopy of logic. If we are wrong, we are wrong together. The sting of failure is diluted by the sheer number of people who made the exact same miscalculation. We can shrug our shoulders, look at our peers, and say, “Who could have known?”

But this comfort comes at a steep price: mediocrity.

Years ago, the legendary investor Howard Marks crystallized a framework that has haunted my thinking ever since. He mapped out the relationship between predictions and outcomes, arriving at a blunt, inescapable truth about generating extraordinary results. To make really good money—or to achieve outsized success in almost any competitive endeavor—you cannot simply be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong.

“You can’t do the same things others do and expect to outperform.”

Marks’ logic is beautifully ruthless. If your prediction aligns with the consensus and you are right, the rewards are merely average. The market, or the world, has already anticipated and priced in that outcome. There is no edge in seeing what everyone else sees. If your consensus prediction is wrong, you lose, but you lose alongside the herd.

The danger, and the opportunity, lies in the contrarian view.

If you are non-consensus and wrong, you look like a fool. You bear the entirety of the failure alone, stripped of the insulation of the crowd. This is the quadrant of public mockery, isolated defeat, and bruised egos. It is the fear of this quadrant that keeps most people safely tucked inside the consensus.

But the magic—the life-changing returns, the paradigm-shifting innovations, the profound personal breakthroughs—lives exclusively in the final quadrant: being non-consensus and right.

This isn’t just an investing principle; it’s a philosophy for navigating life. We are biologically wired to seek the safety of the herd. To step outside of it requires not just immense intellectual conviction, but a formidable emotional threshold. You have to be willing to sit with the discomfort of being misunderstood, sometimes for years. You have to endure the sympathetic smiles of peers who think you’ve lost the plot.

Creating truly great art, building a lasting company, or making an exceptional investment demands a willingness to be lonely in your convictions. It requires looking at the exact same data as everyone else and seeing a completely different narrative.

However, a vital caveat remains: being different isn’t enough. There are plenty of contrarians who are simply wrong, confusing blind rebellion with profound insight. The goal isn’t to be a contrarian for the sake of being difficult or edgy. The goal is to perceive a truth the crowd has missed.

It is a quiet, solitary bet against the world’s prevailing wisdom. And when the world finally catches up to where you have been standing all along, the reward is entirely yours.