On money, work, and living well.
In urban India, ordering in went from occasional treat to weekend ritual to any-time convenience. The trajectory took roughly a decade. What drove the final leg was not the food aggregation apps getting better. It was the economics getting harder.
Read the essay →Broadly gendered audience response to a female pop star is unusual. Men and women both fawn over Raye, in comparable volume and similar language, in a way that most female pop-star appeal does not generate. The reason is structural. Her appeal operates on a different contract with the audience than most contemporary pop does — transport rather than identification — and the return of that older contract, in a decade of parasocial pop dominance, is the reason her success is registering as broadly as it is. Her appeal is not identification but transport: the pleasure of leaving your own head for the length of the song, of being inside her voice and her arrangement rather than seeing yourself reflected in her life.
Read essay →A significant proportion of the readers of Crime and Punishment identify quietly with Raskolnikov. The identification is not usually about the murder, which most readers correctly find horrifying, and not usually about the brilliance, which few readers actually have. It is about a specific psychological structure Dostoevsky captured with unusual precision — the tension between the theory the analytical mind builds about its own exceptionality and the moral apparatus that refuses to let the theory close.
Read essay →Ozymandias is the central villain of Watchmen and the character who saves the world. He is not evil in any register the reader can dismiss — self-made, extraordinarily productive, extremely well-read, convinced that his intelligence gives him standing to make civilisational decisions. Alan Moore wrote him in 1986 as a warning about a specific personality type. Forty years on, the archetype has moved from graphic novel to private sector, and the specific danger the novel identified — not the mass-murder version, the uncheckability version — has become visible in real time.
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