Exploring Remote-Friendly Industries

Many predictions and concerns tumbled into the slipstream trailing ChatGPT’s dazzling, turbulent entrance onto the technology scene in late 2022. Few of these initial warnings felt more immediate than those of imminent disruptions to higher education. “Could the chatbot, which provides coherent, quirky, and conversational responses to simple language inquires, inspire more students to cheat?”, asked an NBC News article, published only a week after ChatGPT’s initial launch. Several months later, a professor in the Texas A&M system took this warning to heart and failed his entire class after convincing himself that every one of his students had used AI to write thei…

I’m writing this post about eighteen hours before the first polls open on Election Day, and it feels tense out there. The New York Times, for example, just posted an article headlined: “How Americans Feel About the Election: Anxious and Scared.” Based on extensive interviews conducted over this past weekend, the Times concludes: “Americans across the political spectrum reported heading to the polls in battleground states with a sense that their nation was coming undone. While some expressed relief that the long election season was finally nearing an end, it was hard to escape the undercurrent of uneasiness about Election Day.” These results probably come a…

Between this newsletter, my podcast, my books, and my New Yorker journalism, I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about how the modern digital environment impacts our lives, both professionally and personally, and how we should respond. This techno-pontification covers everything from the nitty gritty details of producing good work in an office saturated with emails and Zoom, to heady decisions about shaping a meaningful life amid the nihilistic abstraction of an increasingly networked existence. With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down for the holidays, I thought it mi…

In 2006, a high school student from Ontario named James Hobson started posting to a new platform called YouTube. His early videos were meant for his friends, and focused on hobbies (like parkour) and silliness (like one clip in which he drinks a cup of raw eggs). Hobson’s relationship with YouTube evolved in 2013. Now a trained engineer, he put his skills to work in crafting a pair of metal claws based on the Marvel character, Wolverine. The video was a hit. He then built a working version of the exoskeleton used by Matt Damon’s character in the movie Elysium. This was an even bigger hit. This idea of creating real life versions of props from comics and movies proved…

I recently listened to Tim Ferriss interview the prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (see here for my coverage of Sanderson’s insane underground writing lair). Tim traveled to Utah to talk to Sanderson at the headquarters of his 70-person publishing and merchandising company, Dragonsteel Books. The following exchange, from early in the conversation, caught my attention: Ferriss: “It seems like, where we’re sitting –and we’re sitting at HQ — it seems like the design of Dragonsteel, maybe the intent behind it, is to allow you to do that [come up with stories] on some level.” Sanderson: “Yeah, yeah, I mean everything in our company is built around, ‘let Br…

A reader recently sent me a clip from Chris Williamson’s podcast. In the segment, Williamson discusses his evolving relationship with productivity: “Look, I come from a productivity background. When I first started this show, I was chatting shit about Pomodoro timers, and Notion external brains, and Ebbinhaus forgetting curves, and all of that. Right? I’ve been through the ringer, so I’m allowed to say, and, um, you realize after a while that it ends up being this weird superstitious rain dance you’re doing, this sort of odd sort of productivity rain dance, in the desperate hope that later that day you’re going to get something done.” I was intrigued by this te…

On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team played their first spring training game of the season. I was listening to the radio call in the background as I went about my day. I also, however, kept an eye on a community blog called Talk Nats. The site moderators had posted an article about today’s game. As play unfolded, a group of Nationals fans gathered in the comment threads to discuss the unfolding action. Much of the discussion focused on specific plays. “Nasty from Ferrer,” noted a commenter, soon after one of the team’s best relief pitchers, Jose Ferrer, struck out two batters. “Looks like we took the Ferreri [sic] out of the garage,” someo…

I’m writing this from a rental property, on a hillside overlooking the northern reach of the Taconic Mountains. A key feature of this property is a small outbuilding, designed and built by the current owner as a quiet place for visitors to work. Spanning, at most, twelve feet square, it features a daybed, a heating stove, and a desk arranged to look outward toward the distant peaks. A ceiling fan moves the air on muggy afternoons. Here’s a view from the desk: This rental property, in other words, includes a canonical example of one of my all-time favorite styles of functional architecture: the writing shed. (Indeed, as the owner told me, I’m not the first…

Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector: a growing interest in the viability of a 4-day workweek. Iceland helped spark this movement with a series of government-sponsored trials which unfolded between 2015 and 2019. The experiment eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which, believe it or not, is about 1% of Iceland’s total working population. These subjects were drawn from multiple different types of workplaces, including, notably, offices and social service providers. Not everyone dropped an entire workday, but most participants reduced their schedule from forty hours to at most thirty-six hours a week o…

I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point toward two very different conclusions. The first narrative notes that Large Language Models (LLMs) are exceptionally well-suited for coding because source code, at its core, is just very well-structured text, which is exactly what these models excel at generating. Because of this tight match between need and capability, the programming industry is serving as an economic sacrificial lamb, the first major sector to suffer a major AI-driven upheaval. There has been no shortage of evidence to support these claims. Here are s…

In the wake of my recent (and inaugural) visit to Disneyland, I read Richard Snow’s history of the park, Disney’s Land. Early in the book, Snow tells a story that I hadn’t heard before. It fascinated me—not just for its details, but also, as I’ll soon elaborate, for its potential relevance to our current moment. The tale begins in 1948. According to Snow, Disney’s personal nurse and informal confidant, Hazel George, had become worried. “[She] began to sense that her boss was sinking into what seemed to her to be a dangerous depression,” Snow writes. “Perhaps even heading toward what was then called a nervous breakdown.” The sources of this distress were obvious. …

A reader recently sent me ​a Substack post​ they thought I might like. “I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of their hands while still letting them chat with friends,” the post’s author, Priscilla Harvey, writes. “But it’s turned into the sweetest, most unexpected surprise: my son’s new daily conversations with his grandmothers.” As Harvey continues, her son has adopted the habit of stretching out on the couch, talking to his grandmother on a retro rotary-style phone, the long cable stretching across the room. “There’s no scrolling, no distractions, no comparisons, no dopamine hits to chase,” she notes. “Instead he is just listening to stories…

In the years since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, it’s been hard not to get swept up in feelings of euphoria or dread about the looming impacts of generative AI. This reaction has been fueled, in part, by the confident declarations of tech CEOs, who have veered toward increasingly bombastic rhetoric. “AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently told Anderson Cooper. He added that half of entry-level white collar jobs might be “wiped out” in the next one to five years, creating unemployment levels as high as 20%—a peak last seen during the Great Depression. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said that …

Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur named Emil Barr published a Wall Street Journal op-ed boasting a provocative title:​ “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.”​ He opens with a spicy take: “I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million…When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.” As Barr elaborates, when starting his first company, he slept only three and a half hours per night. “The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gaine…

Last fall, a Norwegian psychology professor named Lars Dehli was asked to give a lecture on intelligence. It had been a while since he had taught the topic, so he looked forward to revisiting it. As he explained in ​an essay​ about the experience, he decided to start the lecture by discussing the so-called Flynn Effect—the well-known phenomenon, first observed by James Flynn, whereby measured IQ scores have been steadily increasing since World War II. “It’s always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who have ever lived,” Dehli wrote. But as he gathered data to build an up-to-date chart, he was “very surprised” by what he discovered: “IQ h…

Many of you have been asking me about the assassination of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk earlier this week during a campus event at Utah Valley University. At the time of this writing, little is yet known about the shooter’s motives, but there have been enough cases of political violence over the past year that I think I can say what I’m about to with conviction… Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase, “Twitter is not real life.” But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter (and Bluesky, and TikTok) do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the left or the right, t…

At a time when educators are increasingly concerned about technology’s impact in the classroom, the Washington Post published ​an op-ed​ with a contrarian tone. The piece, written by the journalism professor Stephen Kurczy, focuses on Green Bank, a small town in rural West Virginia, home to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. Due to the sensitivity of this device, the entire area is a congressionally designated “radio quiet zone” in which cell service and WiFi are banned. The thought of a disconnected life might sound refreshing, but as this op-ed argues, there’s one group for which this reality might be causing problems: the students in Green Bank’s combin…

If there’s one thing that I’m always late to discover, it has to be online youth trends. True to form, I’m only now starting to hear about the so-called “Great Lock In of 2025.” This idea began circulating on TikTok over the summer. Borrowing the term ‘lock in’, which is Gen Z slang for focusing without distraction on an important goal, this challenge asks people to spend the last four months of 2025 working on the types of personal improvement resolutions that they might otherwise defer until the New Year. “It’s just about hunkering down for the rest of the year and doing everything that you said you’re going to do,” explained one TikTok influencer, ​quoted recently​…