Every election and every competition will end in a reckoning. The loser will be left with a simple question: were they wrong, or was I?

The term “facing the facts” exists because it is uncomfortable for everybody – not one excluded – to face the realities of certain situations that do not align with our goals. If you invested $200,000 into resources, classes, and travel to pursue your dream of becoming an actor and never got a single role, it will be heartbreaking to accept the reality that a change may be necessary. If you held a grudge with a childhood friend for ages, only to find out that they were right the whole time and that now you’ve alienated some of your other friends or companions, coming to terms with that reality will be remarkably disappointing.

After the jury sentences him to death, Socrates tells the men who voted against him that he holds no anger toward them, and asks only that they treat his sons as he treated Athens. Yet when his agriculturist friend Crito offers him an escape from prison just weeks later, he refuses: fleeing would be unjust in its own way, despite his conviction that imprisonment was as well

The former is much different than the latter. Wishing goodwill on the very people who condemned him, even trusting them with his own sons, is sympathy for those who voted against him; an admission that they had their reasons, and that he still wants good things for the city that turned him away.

Choosing to stay in prison and accept your death sentence is no longer sympathy; it is facing the facts. It is an acceptance that, regardless of who is right and who is wrong, the consequences of his actions were realized by a society of people who disdained them.

In the past 48 hours, there have been far more proponents of this sympathy than many have expected. Losers are not supposed to sympathize with those who supported the winners; political losers, those blessed or burdened with the power of public sentiment, are expected to even less so.

You can be the Vice President or a Governor or an ancient philosopher or a sanitation worker, yet the difficulty will always be the same. And still, the surprise will be the same. There are countless who have taken to the Internet to claim their shock at such sympathy, at such a turn of opinion in a seemingly-endlessly-divided nation.

If the Athenians in the agora had heeded Socrates, if they had heard his sympathy and thought he may have been right, perhaps they would have let him out of jail. Maybe he would have become a musician, as a recurring dream always told him, or perhaps an artisan. It may have even led him to be a better father to his children, to ingratiate himself into the politics of his day, or even a trader that sailed and explored the Mediterranean.

But there is also a chance that he had escaped and Socrates is Socrates. The philosophizing and trains of thought that governed his mind for decades are unshakable; the convictions that brought him to his death are convictions. His followers will undoubtedly return to him, and once again, as they did just days before, they will meet to debate and publicize those same convictions.

Sympathy can certainly “help to make [the facts] more bearable.” Few victors or supporters across the country will claim that Republican sympathy is not needed, or rather, long-awaited. But they may say that the facts have not been faced yet, for they have not. Socrates is contemplating Crito’s offer at the gates. Another day, he will make his decision.

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I have been working with a new writer on a project about economic sovereignty, and while I will share more in the coming months, I cannot resist returning to something I wrote about a few months ago: predicting the future. Very few mean it literally, but far more act on their predictions anyway. Who gets to determine the future? How can we get there? Does everyone have the same access to it?

It is far too often a cliche — whether true or not — to claim that life’s actions will occur to you, and then you will simply respond. One ball will swing one way, and your ball will respond the other way.

It is also far too often a cliche to say, and almost certainly true, that life’s actions will occur to you and that you have little to no control over them. That some balls were always going to swing one way, and yours would always have to retaliate back at them.

But life is not Newton’s cradle. Sovereignty, whether economic or personal or moral, does not oscillate itself to an equilibrium. There are people who will be better off than others regardless of their actions. There are those who believe their morals will be vindicated, regardless of their consequences.

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Our Newton’s cradle, rather, is not determined by us: someone is watching the swing. The future is not something that happens to us or something we answer; it is something owned, and it belongs to whoever is best at predicting what we will do next. However unpredictable we may think we are, every motion we make eventually swings back to benefit those who have invested in us. It may even begin to resemble a community in that way: reciprocal actions for reciprocal benefits.

This work may not settle the perennial problem of economic sovereignty, nor will it stop the cradles of markets from swinging. The heroes of our favorite films and novels get their equilibrium. The story closes, and the balls come to rest. Everyone loves a bookend.

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Through the proliferation of digital media, the practice of reading has found new life. A recent New Yorker article profiled James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones (UK), who can best be described as an optimistic contrarian. The Atlantic declared that “The Age of Reading is Over”. Reader’s Digest said that a “reader’s slump” is imminent, and is trending in the direction that many have feared. Daunt, however, took Waterstones in 2011 from the brink of bankruptcy into a UK conglomerate. He does not seem to be worried.

Since this profile was released on Monday, and since it has received a remarkable amount of buzz, I have been troubled as to why this piece would be written in the first place. It is fair for the CEO of a literary conglomerate to be optimistic about the state of his business in an industry that is, after all, about to grow five percent annually for the foreseeable future. It is fair for a 26-year-old Cambridge graduate in the ‘90s to think that reading was becoming a global industry in the age of considerable globalization. They are presented as contrarian opinions, and yet, to Daunt, they were nothing more than common sense.

If this rise in digital media, in literature can be narrowed down to one topic, it is that of noticing what we have missed. Literary newsletter writers consolidate sources from interviews you missed as a child, books you never got around to, quotes from your favorite actors that never made their way across your desk. Narrative non-fiction bestsellers (here and here) thrive only when they survive in their niche event, their niche audience that broadens your horizons with an inch of surprise.

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The latest of this trend, a documentary titled You Can See Everything, has only built upon this insecurity by informing us that, in fact, we cannot see everything. Even if we are familiar with the story, the actor, the business, even if it was us, even if we were defrauded out of millions of dollars, we may not be able to understand what happened to us.

There are few that left YCSE content with the knowledge they just gained. Sure, they were granted access into the life of an infamous cultural figure, but they may never know what it was like between Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder. Just like they may never know why it actually was that Daunt opened his first bookstore in the ‘90s. I understand, however. I also did not know, until Tuesday, that Barnes & Noble is owned by Elliott Investment Management, a hedge fund headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida.

It was not long ago that Barnes & Noble, amidst the decline of independent booksellers in the 1990’s, was declared the “Evil Empire” of the business. Just years before, however, the New Yorker was considered the ultimate velvet rope for literary writers, a monopoly of high-end literary validation that, while silenced, has very much permeated its reputation. Cultural authority allows for rebrands, but very rarely does it allow for its customers to forget. It seems that times have changed.

The numbers themselves are optimistic. Bookstores are places of culture, gathering places, hubs for conversation and coffee and meetups that were much different than the Toys-R-Us’ they were converted from years ago. Page-to-screen adaptations are still as, if not more prominent than they were in the age of content circulation. Daunt did fundamentally restructure Barnes & Noble by ending the practice of taking publisher money for front-table placements.

It is almost too hard to tell. When restaurants proclaimed that in-person dining was back after their hiatus in 2020, there was plenty of food left on the table. When magazines proclaim that the era of reading is back to an ivory tower of readers who disdain the times they find themselves in. The optimism in the wake of Daunt’s profile is surely to be expected not only from him, but from the New Yorker as well. It is also readily consumed by those for whom it is contrarian enough to be worth consuming.

When Daunt smiles, his friend says, “his face disappears into his eyes, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Not that he looks like a cloud - but he’s otherwise quite hard to read.” But, even then, I think he might say something different. I know there are days when it’s hard to tell if the sun is coming out.

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During the intro to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, the unnamed narrator takes her place at a film screening. We don’t know where it is, how many people were there, or even what film it was. The director of the film begins by discussing the evening, followed by their theory of “pure cinema” – what it means to produce film at the highest level. 

Pure cinema, according to the director, wasn’t an intricate theory of parts and indigestible terms provided by decades of theory and critique. It was the “interplay of light and dark, expressed as a kind of rhythm, over time.” The highest form of cinema, the grandest display of the art form was simply the notion of light and dark, expressed over time. 

The criterion of judgment for this highest form of cinema in the present day is certainly different than Smith’s idea in Swing Time, a competition flooded by inflated accolades and awards almost too overwhelming to keep count of. Vertical short forms have flooded talent markets. Short and indie films are far too expensive to be widely made. And modern day feature films are far too competitive, far too complex to keep up with its characters nonetheless its reputations.

The novel moves from here at a remarkable pace, following the narrator and her friend’s development as titular swing dancers. One is a poet; gliding, elegant, making music of her own with her feet. The other is a politician; ungraceful, straightforward, struggling to balance her movements with her thoughts.

One is black and white; the other is filled with color. It is only together that they embody the director's theory better than any screen could: the interplay of light and dark, rhythm expressed across years instead of minutes. Pure cinema happens in the space between two bodies learning to trust each other's weight, in the way feet find rhythm that hands and hearts will follow, in the slow accumulation of touch and adjustment until two separate people move as one organism, their friendship written first in muscle and bone before it ever reaches language.

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For the young boy that I once was, there were few joys greater than being at the lunch table. Crowding around with your friends, chatting about something egregious, eating certain foods that we can only reflect on with a certain flavor of disgust. It is a joy that can only be amplified, however, by one of those friends pulling out the phone he snuck out of his locker that day and opening the app that we would all inevitably open once the bell rang: SoundCloud.

Cathartic is too weak an adjective. It could have been anywhere in the world, the head bobbing, the foot tapping, the impromptu adlibs to words that we were too young to understand, and yet it was hard to forget that we were all there.

Ogi Ifediora and Anoop D’Souza, the creative duo behind sunandmoon, do not make music for SoundCloud kids, but were happy to share with me that theirs received some head bobs as well. When Ogi’s brother played it for his friends, the response was immediate, yet much quieter. Some nodding, followed by the adlibs being replaced by words of affirmation.

The old feeling had simply found a new room.

It is easy for me to conceptualize the creative sessions behind the duo’s music, very much because it was easy for me to sit at that lunch table. They are not musicians that make music out of desire, out of a desire to repurpose it into content, out of a desire to fulfill the title of “artists” that they have declared themselves as.

That much has been settled.

Their first two singles, “in the movies” and “circles”, embody this. They are both reflective, the former a nostalgic tune in which Ogi walks you through your longing for those you don’t miss anymore, the latter defined by its maximalist, powerful production from Anoop, intriguing you before it breaks. In our conversation last week, both Ogi and Anoop emphasized they had no words to define these singles and the process that they undertook. Circling around adjectives – “unique”, “necessity”, “yo” – for longer than our allotted time, it was clear that whatever they were looking for had already found them.

Perhaps it is easy for them, and for me, to conceptualize because there are no words that truly contain their work. The words “sun” and “moon” are inherently contradictory, and despite what they insisted to me, a large portion of their process seems to be successful due to these contradictions. Anoop may be the creative engine, but Ogi is the filter. Anoop is the instigator, but Ogi may be the realist who puts ideas into action.

The other portion, though, that 1% between artist and musician, tends to reveal itself elsewhere. It may just be why they attracted attention from household-name industry greats. It may be why they bonded over growing up in immigrant families in middle America, feeling as though they had both everywhere and nowhere to run. It may be why they were able to put together an entire project in just a week, turning the pressures of daily life not into inspiration, but into the product itself.

And it may be why, when I asked them about these contradictions I had heard, they couldn’t put a single word to what sunandmoon is.

Later that day, though, those boys around the table will go home, dap each other up once more, and forget about the day’s events. They will forget to mention it to their families, waltz through their routines, and banter with their siblings until the next morning, when they will run out the door to the bus, dap their friends up again, stretching their lips into a smile as they think about sneaking their phone past the teachers just as they did their parents that morning, as they think about bobbing their heads once more, this time to something of their own. It’s almost like they had no choice.

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The cherry orchard that survives in Chekhov’s play of the same name is not the one that we are greeted to within its first pages. We are greeted in a land of mystique, one where color and business and the Earth thrive as one. It is the Ranevskaya family’s prized possession, and rightfully so.

For without the orchard, the land on which they have made their livelihood, the land under which their reputation thrives, the Ranevskayas are another family in community around them. They are not the community themselves. Remove it and the structure collapses, revealing what was always true: they are ordinary people who happened to inherit something extraordinary

Wealth has a way of narrowing vision even as it expands possibility. Even in the broadest of fields, the largest of communities, we are unable to see past our own reflection. It was only a matter of time before the Ranevskayas stood in their beloved orchard unable to see the world reshaping itself around them. They are cherry blossoms mistaking themselves for the tree. Beautiful, beloved, and already falling.

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There are only so many ways that one can live, but nearly all of them involve speculating about the future, living one day solely with a desire to wake up for the next.

It is in this way that the future has always been less of a destination, and more of a marketplace. Somewhere to browse, to see what you’d like rather than rushing to a conclusion. The popularity of prediction markets indicates that we ask participants to wager on elections, interest rates, wars, court decisions, even the weather, reducing uncertainty into a price that rises and falls by the second. We remain convinced that if enough people agree upon tomorrow, tomorrow itself will feel obligated to listen.

The idea traces back to a bar in Iowa City in 1988, where three university economists, annoyed that the polls had missed Jesse Jackson’s win in Michigan, decided a market might predict an election better than a pollster could. When the votes came in that fall, the market had called the race closer than Gallup, Harris, or the Times.

However, with recent reports elaborating that prediction markets like Polymarket have falsely advertised their users winning tens of thousands of dollars, predicting the future seems to have come easy these days. The Iowan bettors who followed were real, and so was their money. The digital crowd that convinces us to bet today is not. It is not the same as Renaissance Italians betting on the papal conclave, yet it is the same principle: if you put enough money behind something, it may come true.

Why should anyone believe this forecast? It is solely a matter of social proof. If there are thousands of other people placing their money in this result – and seemingly becoming millionaires as a result of it – then, in a matter of moments, you’ve become the one left behind.

The principle has changed, now, then. If you put enough money behind something, there is no longer a chance it may come true. Someone will make it come true.

A man who had often felt – or, rather, been told that he was – left behind, Chinese philosopher Guan Zhong prodded against these near-sighted glasses he saw growing popular. “The best investment for one year is to grow grains; the best investment for ten years is to grow trees; the best investment for a lifetime is to educate people.”

When there is no longer a desire for education, no longer any trees to grow, it is no wonder the grains have taken such a heightened importance, for grains will grow into trees, into sprawling, gorgeous leaves, into canopies that inevitably, beautifully, shade our view of the ground, innocent in the way any forgery is.

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There is no reason to decide between being sympathetic and unsympathetic. We are both, and for good reason. We naturally sympathize with those that we see ourselves in, those whose circumstances we recognize as similar to our own. And we withhold it from those who have harmed us, those who are not aligned with us.

A perfect example of who can garner both from us is the social loser. Losers that are picked on for no reason, who may have a harsh family life, losers that we could be friends with if it were not for the social taboo. Then losers that have despised everything and everyone around them, who refuse to make respectful conversation, losers that are fine with being losers so long as everyone else is deemed something worse.

The point of writing this, however, is not to bully the second one, nor is it to implore you to text the first one back. It is to recognize that they are often the same person. The Mark Zuckerbergs were long considered innocently nerdy before they stripped us of any sense of digital privacy.

In Ted Lasso, the titular character’s assistant Nate follows nearly the exact same pipeline. When we meet him in the series’ early days, he is nothing more than an innocent, awkward equipment manager for whom we long for his success. Fast forward three years, however, and our sympathy has morphed into distaste, as there is little to no innocence in the power-grabbing, unempathetic coach we see him shape up to be.

The awkward nerd and the contemptible tech mogul are not always different people. Call it the dichotomy of losers or the slippery slope of men. Young men are increasingly seeking validation and role models from online sources, leading to both a decrease in social skills and physical intimacy. It is why “trad” wives and the manosphere are more popular than they have ever been, with algorithms feeding such information to boys before they can even shape an opinion on it.

Dichotomies are supposed to consist of two things that are inherently opposite one another; two beings that share no qualities except that they are being compared. The struggle with losers, however, is that they often occupy both sides at once, both sympathetic and unsympathetic, and that we fail to realize that one can quickly become a pipeline to the next. But it is difficult to know which side someone will end up on.

To Nate, to Mark Zuckerberg, to many of these men, our sympathy is one of the crucial forces that shapes what comes next for them. Pour it on, and you may be able to hold a conversation. Withhold it, and loneliness may be hardened into contempt, spite, entitlement.

We reserve our sympathy for those we recognize and those who might one day be useful to us. It is an efficient system. But it is also a closed one: the men who most need it are, by definition, the ones we have decided not to see ourselves in.

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It was 100 years ago to the day, and yet people were struggling. Japan had just elected a new leader. The world around it had suffered from coups, from militant governments, from the wake of the travesty it had brought upon itself. Parisians struggled to balance the weight of their citizens with the value of foreigners that had so desperately fought to live there.

It was 200 years ago to the day, and yet people were struggling in different ways. The Era of Good Feelings had just come to a halt, dividing the nation into two staunchly different political sects. The Presidential election had been disputed by thousands of people, causing even more disarray in a fractioned state. Pedro I was abdicated as King of Portugal, ushering in an era marked by scandal, authoritarianism, and distrust.

It was 2,000 years ago to the day, and yet people were conquered. The world was predominantly ruled by one empire. The average life expectancy was nearly 35 years, with child and infant mortality leading the way. Summers were amongst the coldest on Earth, the rains wiping out nearly any progress that the Mediterranean farmers had made.

It was 4.5 billion years ago, before memory, before history, before anyone was around to feel the weight of either. Time, as it was, would come to keep two sets of records.

It was 2,000 years ago to the day. Ovid’s Metamorphoses was being copied and shared across the Roman world. Scholars in Alexandria were preserving texts that would carry human knowledge through the darkness ahead. Remarkably, glassblowing had just been invented, transforming sand into transparency.

It was 200 years ago to the day. Felix Mendelssohn had just completed the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French inventor, captured the very first photograph, one that still survives to this day. The Last of the Mohicans, a monumental snapshot of American history, was first published and distributed to the Philadelphian masses.

It was 100 years ago to the day. The United Kingdom general strike began promptly, urging the government to act on behalf of its laborers. Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to successfully swim the distance from France to England, crossing the channel herself. Winnie the Pooh made its debut before charming millions of households and children across the globe.

It is today, some 2,000 years later. And there is nothing to look forward to but tomorrow.

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It has always been hard to imagine an empty street.

I believe there is a reason for that. Even if they are not the most potent, if you still have to squint to discern, to test whether or not you’ve drifted into a dream state, something will be illuminated by their streetlights. A newly-minted couple, hands brushing upon each other’s, each waiting for the grasp that relieves the shrilling tension in both of their shoulders. Or even a rat, scurrying along past the couple’s feet, solely hoping they don’t notice his descent into the sewer beneath their steps.

There is a reason why nearly 80% of the entire U.S. population – just shy of 265,000,000 people – lives in a densely populated urban area.

I am one of them. There are parts of Los Angeles that are undeniably beautiful. There are parts which we are naturally drawn to, the sprawling landscapes living in harmony with the focused street grids living in harmony with the families who thought they would like to see both but live in neither. If you asked a group of people living here how they would describe the city, there may be some outliers. But I can almost guarantee that the one recurring word is the one I led with: “beautiful.”

The same goes with most other cities. An undeniable pride – a sort of malaise that loops you into both infeasible depression and unbridled happiness, a pride that makes you concerned not for yourself, but for those in your life who have not shared the same experiences as you – is the primary symptom. It is as true for Los Angeles as it is for Boston as it is for Madison.

There is a reason why elections in such cities are widely contested cultural events. For both residents and non-residents, there is a sense that the outcome determines something about the cultural identity of its people, and subsequently, the people that share in their malaise. Those who were against Zohran Mamdani were forced to grapple with a culture that was falling out of line, a sense of connection that was more desperate than it was effective. Those who supported him, however, could see something of their own reflected back at them.

It is hard to imagine an empty street because there will never be one. There will always be big cities with big problems, and there will always be people waiting to both defend and complain about them. Some will dream of leaving and some will dream of returning, both convinced by the belief that the things that make it difficult to live are quite often what make it feel the most alive.

Even if we are forced to walk by rats, to wait in anticipation to see whether the mayor will advance to the next primary, to see the light flicker, shrouding us in darkness before illuminating us once again, the street will not be empty. As we walk, we know that the boy has inched closer now, that his fingers have interlocked with hers, that they have both stretched their necks towards the sky, craning, sighing into one another as they feel it leave their bodies.

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There is no strategy to Chutes and Ladders. Despite what I may have thought as a child, there was nothing I could do to avoid those traps. Every move was a matter of luck. Roll the dice and see where you may land. Some turns you were safe. Other times you just got caught in the trap.

I am almost certain that there is someone out there, someone in this world who has never played Chutes & Ladders but is living by its logic. They have been told that life is a game of luck. They will move through it gracefully, peacefully controlling their every step until the chutes catch up to them. They are dragged back down.

It is a hostile lifestyle that this person lives, one defined not by their actions but how they are acted upon. They may have just been caught in a string of bad economic circumstances, just as a record rate of young Americans are. They may have lost out on the job they had interviewed for just for the boss’ nephew to get hired. They may have just loved someone who left.

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Maybe they were just caught in the heat of an action. The Kafka protagonist who gets caught for something he may not have done, something he may have forgotten about, or something that was so miniscule he has brushed away as a simple occurrence of habit. Or maybe it was the Camus protagonist who got caught committing a crime in broad daylight, a crime for which everyone around him seems to have an opinion on. Or maybe it’s even the Tolstoy protagonist caught in the midst of their love affair, having done nothing wrong but pursuing the feelings they have always known were more right than they were wrong.

But I am even more certain that there are more people that are not aware of this logic. Those that have lived by the logic that success is not defined by their chutes, or rather that their luck is simply better. There is peace in a game defined by something out of your control. And when there is peace, there is luck.

These two groups share something in common: they don’t want to get caught. The former simply doesn’t want to get caught up in the whims of life. They don’t want to wake up and realize that the chute was closer than it seemed, that the ladder was farther away, that their turn was just an inevitable delay of the gauntlet ahead. The latter just doesn’t want to get caught being lucky.

Because even if you are successful, you may not want to get caught doing what you do. Kafka’s protagonist was a prominent chief financial officer at a local bank. Tolstoy’s protagonists are career aristocrats, bouncing from palace to palace in search of each other.

Someone is always rolling the dice next to you, and the only thing worse than getting caught in a chute is watching them land on a ladder. There is no strategy to the game but the one. Don’t get caught. You might just be ok.

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There’s an old Kafka parable about a man who spends his life waiting at the gate of Law, the gatekeeper preventing him from moving further, where he understands he will be met with more gatekeepers and obstacles themselves. It is only until the man ages, time drifting away from himself, that the gatekeeper reveals to him that the gate has been open the whole time–he was simply never able to take the first step. 

I like to think that there is an alternate version of this story. One where the man realizes the opening in the gate and steps through, before being met with the second gatekeeper. The second gatekeeper keeps him for a year before allowing him through to the third, who does the same until the fourth, and so on until the man finds himself returning to the bliss of the first story, choosing to sit outside until an inner peace is found. 

Or, a third version. The man steps up to the gate and asks the gatekeeper why, if he is the only one waiting, he can’t be let through immediately. The gatekeeper claims that he has been instructed not to let anyone inside the law at this moment, and to do so would mean a sure end to his career and wellbeing. The man can hear footsteps on the other side, perhaps from residents, from laborers, he assumes. He struts forward, pushing open the gate itself, only to find that the footsteps were not residents of the law, but the gatekeepers themselves, waiting there as if to expect – and promptly reject – the man’s arrival.

As I put these together, however, it became evident that whether the man waits, advances step by step, or forces his way through makes no difference as to his outcome. Kafkaesque writing is defined by patience, obedience, and a growing defiance against an existential world. But the limits we confront in modern life are often less about the things we touch, the money we count than the architecture of the world we inhabit. For what barred the man was not the particular gatekeeper or the order of gates, but the inescapable structure of the Law itself.

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In a game of everyday life, it is simply not enough to be. It is simply not enough to embrace the results of the game, to be reactive amidst a mindset that demands hunger and motion.

At least, that’s how Katsushika Hokusai felt – at 73 years old, nonetheless. Having spent his life as the prolific artist behind one of the world’s most famous paintings, it was only at this age that he began to blossom. “To fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish” was his achievement in his 70s, only just starting to see the way a fish bends through water, the way a bird lifts its body into the sky not with ease but with effort.

And still, it wasn’t enough.

There is something further, stronger, lying beneath our feet unseen but shaking as if to push us forward. It is the latest prospect showing up to the gym despite his trainer cancelling. It is Calvino’s reader, who, in the face of the love of his life, still can’t draw his mind away from the pages he’s yet to finish. It is Hokusai, painting, searching for the beauty of a moment he hadn’t witnessed, mad with the ache of almost.

Let us never forget the story of Chuang-Tzu. An expert craftsman during the Warring States period, the king asked him to draw a crab, to which he responded the task necessitated “five years, a country house, and twelve servants.” After those five were completed, he said, another five were needed. And thus, after ten years of waiting, the king demanded his crab, for which Chuang-Tzu picked up his brush and “with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.”

We may be waiting for our crab, but there is no doubt it will be perfect. For the cities are stars and the people are the moon, so what better way to admire them.

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There are only so many ways that one can live, but nearly all of them involve speculating about the future, living one day solely with a desire to wake up for the next.

It is in this way that the future has always been less of a destination, and more of a marketplace. Somewhere to browse, to see what you’d like rather than rushing to a conclusion. The popularity of prediction markets indicates that we ask participants to wager on elections, interest rates, wars, court decisions, even the weather, reducing uncertainty into a price that rises and falls by the second. We remain convinced that if enough people agree upon tomorrow, tomorrow itself will feel obligated to listen.

The idea traces back to a bar in Iowa City in 1988, where three university economists, annoyed that the polls had missed Jesse Jackson’s win in Michigan, decided a market might predict an election better than a pollster could. When the votes came in that fall, the market had called the race closer than Gallup, Harris, or the Times.

However, with recent reports elaborating that prediction markets like Polymarket have falsely advertised their users winning tens of thousands of dollars, predicting the future seems to have come easy these days. The Iowan bettors who followed were real, and so was their money. The digital crowd that convinces us to bet today is not. It is not the same as Renaissance Italians betting on the papal conclave, yet it is the same principle: if you put enough money behind something, it may come true.

Why should anyone believe this forecast? It is solely a matter of social proof. If there are thousands of other people placing their money in this result – and seemingly becoming millionaires as a result of it – then, in a matter of moments, you’ve become the one left behind.

The principle has changed, now, then. If you put enough money behind something, there is no longer a chance it may come true. Someone will make it come true.

A man who had often felt – or, rather, been told that he was – left behind, Chinese philosopher Guan Zhong prodded against these near-sighted glasses he saw growing popular. “The best investment for one year is to grow grains; the best investment for ten years is to grow trees; the best investment for a lifetime is to educate people.”

When there is no longer a desire for education, no longer any trees to grow, it is no wonder the grains have taken such a heightened importance, for grains will grow into trees, into sprawling, gorgeous leaves, into canopies that inevitably, beautifully, shade our view of the ground, innocent in the way any forgery is.

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If you were at the center of the world, could you stand the attention?

Could you stand the eyeballs of everyone you passed gravitating towards you? Could you stand the pressure the world brings with it, the expectations and the demands?

In Spike Lee’s He Got Game, Jesus Shuttleworth is a profoundly popular high-school basketball prospect. His game is undeniable, but neither is the pressure he consistently takes on: from colleges, from agents, from opponents, from the media.

But clouding over every decision he makes, every person he talks or doesn’t talk to, is a loved one. A loved one that has not been a part of his life for a while, but has loomed over his personality. A loved one who made his fair share of bad decisions in the past yet still wanted to determine his family’s future. It was his father, Jake, and he had just gotten released from prison.

At the center of the world, and at the center of this film, is a person trying to distinguish between who loves them and who simply cares for them. Between a person who is there for them now and a person who will be there for them later.

When you’re the center of the world, relationships that should be unconditional can become conditional. The people closest to you stop asking what you want and start telling you what you’re capable of, as if potential is the same thing as obligation, as if being good at something means you owe it to everyone to become great in exactly the way they’ve imagined.

At the climax of the film, Jesus does what he does best, only this time with his father. One-on-one, the terms brutally simple: if Jake wins, Jesus goes to his father’s desired school, and if Jesus wins, Jake returns to prison and they never speak again. Winning something may mean someone loses everything.

As people, we make our most consequential decisions not in moments of clarity but in the murky territory where love and obligation become indistinguishable. But we are not the center of the world. We may not carry the attention of millions, of thousands, but we do carry the attention of tens of those in our lives.

Jesus wins and his father, to his dismay, is sent back to prison. He earns the right to walk away clean, and the terms are clear — he never has to see Jake again, never has to carry the weight of his father’s mistakes or desperate need for redemption.

And then Jesus chooses his father’s school anyway. The game gave him freedom, but freedom wasn’t enough. The game gave him attention, but attention wasn’t enough. The heaviest weight that he carried, the catalyst for his decision, was not the eyes of millions. It was the knowledge that someone he loved was still waiting to see if he would choose them over himself

At the center of the world, or at the center of just ten people’s worlds, the question remains the same: when the person you love needs something from you that costs everything, can you stand the attention of knowing they’re watching, waiting, hoping you’ll choose them despite every reason not to.

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It was 100 years ago to the day, and yet people were struggling. Japan had just elected a new leader. The world around it had suffered from coups, from militant governments, from the wake of the travesty it had brought upon itself. Parisians struggled to balance the weight of their citizens with the value of foreigners that had so desperately fought to live there.

It was 200 years ago to the day, and yet people were struggling in different ways. The Era of Good Feelings had just come to a halt, dividing the nation into two staunchly different political sects. The Presidential election had been disputed by thousands of people, causing even more disarray in a fractioned state. Pedro I was abdicated as King of Portugal, ushering in an era marked by scandal, authoritarianism, and distrust.

It was 2,000 years ago to the day, and yet people were conquered. The world was predominantly ruled by one empire. The average life expectancy was nearly 35 years, with child and infant mortality leading the way. Summers were amongst the coldest on Earth, the rains wiping out nearly any progress that the Mediterranean farmers had made.

It was 4.5 billion years ago, before memory, before history, before anyone was around to feel the weight of either. Time, as it was, would come to keep two sets of records.

It was 2,000 years ago to the day. Ovid’s Metamorphoses was being copied and shared across the Roman world. Scholars in Alexandria were preserving texts that would carry human knowledge through the darkness ahead. Remarkably, glassblowing had just been invented, transforming sand into transparency.

It was 200 years ago to the day. Felix Mendelssohn had just completed the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French inventor, captured the very first photograph, one that still survives to this day. The Last of the Mohicans, a monumental snapshot of American history, was first published and distributed to the Philadelphian masses.

It was 100 years ago to the day. The United Kingdom general strike began promptly, urging the government to act on behalf of its laborers. Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to successfully swim the distance from France to England, crossing the channel herself. Winnie the Pooh made its debut before charming millions of households and children across the globe.

It is today, some 2,000 years later. And there is nothing to look forward to but tomorrow.

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Bud Powell didn’t know he was inventing a new genre of music. But when he “transformed his piano into a horn”, it was hard not to notice the iconic spirit emanating from his sound.

At only 15 years old, Powell strung together his rigid classical education with a street-like passion and dropped out of high school, destined to call himself the greatest piano of his era.

And in ways more than one, he was. Less than two years later, Bud was swinging with the biggest players of his time – Dizzy, Parker, Monk – over at Minton’s Playhouse, and holding his own as well. Known for blistering tempos and percussion-esque runs spanning the length of the keys, Powell had unknowingly cemented himself as the “golden boy” of bebop – and helped to shape the genre as we know it today.

The rest of his career is known as fairly lackluster, despite being remarkably successful. A sideman for some of his Minton pals, a leader on a few of his own records, and a touring pianist with Cootie Williams’ big band typically lead his musical headlines; yet it’s often not the music he’s known for.

In 1945, Powell was beaten by the police almost to the point of death. Two years later, a bar fight with a stranger launched a chain of events resulting in eleven months at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. And four years after that, he and Monk were arrested for drug possession, sending him back to Creedmoor for another sixteen months.

It was a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, one reminiscent of an old Sophocles tale. After being released from Creedmoor, Powell was placed into the custody of Oscar Goldstein, his legal guardian and subsequently Birdland’s latest manager, in which he was pressured to marry a woman for the purposes of controlling his business.

He became silent on the bench. “He was so messed up when he came out,” one colleague recalled, “I think they experimented on Bud.” A Kafkaesque situation in which Powell wasn’t in control of – mental decline, corrupt businessmen, “shades of the old plantation” linking him into a social and racial contract which held no place in the bebop community.

His decline was not a personal tragedy – it was a reflection of the unavoidable systemic issues that plagued him throughout his storied career. Even as those around him struggled to reconcile the brilliant pianist they once knew with the withdrawn figure before them, Powell turned to the one friend he knew best – the keys.

And in his last performance, a remarkable comeback at Birdland, the “complete loss” that Bud Powell was called out to be took on a different form of expression – one that required a deeper, more empathetic understanding.

“People think Bud is crazy or lost or silent,” they would conclude, “but all he really is is in a state of grace.”

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When Gabriel Favoino showed up to the Birdhouse Club in Chicago to interview Thelonious Monk, he didn’t expect to find the pianist holding court with a group of college students. But as the dimly lit spot’s floor opened up to aspiring university journalists and jazz enthusiasts, just as he had once been, he couldn’t help but be a fly-on-the-wall for the High Priest’s conversations.

Young men pestered the pianist with questions, philosophical discussions, and pleas for advice on how to play his harmonies. It was a pleasant discussion, one in which Monk not only took pride in, but also enjoyed representing the respected industry figure he had become

Monk seemed to be uncharacteristically talkative that day, straying away from his bipolar bouts of silence, particularly when a group of bystanders implored him to touch on Ornette Colman – the young saxophonist whose development of “free jazz” had seemingly transformed the industry.

To everyone but Monk, of course. “Something was always happenin’, but I don’t think it’s going to revolutionize jazz,” he proclaimed, dismissing the “prophetic” musician as nothing more than a mere imitation. It was a startling answer, yet one that conformed to Monk’s uncompromising artistic standards, as Favoino would later write: “Today’s trailblazers are tomorrow’s conservatives.”

And 50 years after his first novel was published (and 60 more followed), Stephen King found himself in a similar position – no longer today’s “trailblazer” of horror fiction. Reaching almost 72 years old, it was only a matter of time before younger writers would push him closer and closer to irrelevance.

“God will tell me when to retire,” King would reflect in this interview. “He’ll say, ‘Get out of the game, hang up your jock, you’re done.’ But until then, this is the best job in the world because no one can make you retire at a mandatory age.”

True artistry not only transcends fads or trends, but finds the balance between innovation and cultural authenticity. King’s statement is so different from Monk’s, yet so precisely similar. A refusal to conform to external pressures, to cave on the creative vision, to be boxed in by expectations – that’s the real trailblazing.

And for King at least, it seemed to work out quite well. “For now, I’m enjoying what I’m doing and I get to be on The Colbert Show – not a bad deal.”

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An opening makes a promise. It tells you what kind of story you’re about to be in, often before you’ve agreed to anything.

By the first page of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, you are met with a quote. An epigraph, Romans 12:19. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”

For the next 200 pages or so, however, there is nothing to resemble vengeance or revenge or the wrath of a wicked God upon 19th century Russia. There is love, there are emotions, complications, there are remarkable relationships. There are the tales of an entire community whose lives have been upended, not by crisis or wickedness, but by choice, one which was even defensible to some.

Vengeance became the temptation itself, however. In the next 150 years after the book’s publication, it stopped being something to fear and became something to want. We could repay it onto others with ease, with purpose, with an understanding that one deserved vengeance and one did not.

And yet, every act of it ended in the same way. Communities would be stricken with grief they mistook for justice. When the Allies turned on Germany in 1919, the peace lasted twenty years. When Hollywood turned on its own in 1947, it took over a decade for some names to come back.

If our history is the future, then we cannot forget that it has already been the past. Vengeance has been ours for some time. But it shall not repay itself now.

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At the turn of the 20th century, philosopher Henri Bergson risked his career, reputation, and entire field of study to discuss a widely ignored human phenomenon: laughter. To take comedy seriously – a field known solely by clowns, by jesters, by proletariats – was to admit something fundamental about human nature, he argued, to look past the limits one could impose on their communities. Comedians were simply exposing the moment when the script slips.

What Bergson couldn’t have accounted for, however, were comedians raised in a raucous Philadelphia culture. Nor comedians that were triplets. Nor comedians working in abysmal economies, fired from their jobs only to be offered the same one back at a lower wage.

Caroline Timoney, LA-based comedian, however, can account for these specifics. In fact, she lives them.

Growing up with multiple siblings always comes with certainties, and competition is one of them. For Timoney, that competition led to artistry. Being creative, someone who brought something into the world, was what separated her from her siblings, she told me recently. It’s easy to see why; she talks timidly, but with energy, letting her facial expressions do most of the talking while the words arrive a beat later.

Her latest monthly stand-up show, Babe Stopppp, feels almost like an extension of these instincts. The quick pacing, the ability to recognize the shape of a joke and the audience’s reaction before even publishing it. Years of posting viral short-form comedy on TikTok trained a kind of reflex: noticing the strange rhythm of a moment and delivering it before the audience has time to do something else. Editing, she admits, has never been her favorite part of the process anyway. The joke either lands or it doesn’t.

Comedy, however, rarely begins with certainty. It rarely begins with the feeling of knowing what you’re going to say, when you’re going to say it, and exactly how you’re going to get there.

And it is never comfortable.

More often, it begins somewhere embarrassingly small. A failed job. A bad rule. A conversation you weren’t supposed to be a part of in the first place.

During her time at Georgetown, Timoney studied political science, the kind of major that prepares you for very serious conversations about very serious things. The campus was full of them — future diplomats, future policy advisors, future people who spoke neatly about the world. The contrast between her passion and her studies was hard to ignore.

Perhaps more than her Georgetown peers, Timoney knows that the moment someone begins taking themselves too seriously, the joke has already started writing itself. It’s the same instinct Bergson was chasing a century earlier, though he pursued it in the most serious way possible: by standing at a lectern and delivering lectures about laughter. Ten years after Laughter’s publication, he would speak at the University of Birmingham:

“But he who is sure, absolutely sure, of having produced a work which will endure and live, cares no more for praise and feels above glory, because he is a creator, because he knows it, because the joy he feels is the joy of a god.”

The joy that we feel, that Timoney feels, when we make someone laugh is not one of isolation. It is not one of clowns or of jesters or of overly forward government students. It may, for a moment at least, feel a little like being a god.

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