Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having spent most of my life more interested in STEM-adjacent topics. I hadn’t really considered the question consciously before, but I’m certainly thinking about aesthetics more than I used to. I think it’s a confluence of things: • Many things today are ugly and far uglier than they used to be or need to be. Once you see this, it’s kinda hard to stop perceiving it. (Early twentieth century phone boxes versus modern phone boxes; old water fountains versus new water fountains; etc.) As someone with a naively meliorist assumption that most things should be getting better rather than worse, it’s all a bit perplexing: why did we stop doing things nicely? Is it a choice? Was there a malevolent spell cast upon us? This vein led me to think more about modernism and why much of art became more intentionally "challenging", grotesque, opposed to prettiness, rebarbative, dissonant, etc. Can or should anything be done about this? Is this just how things ought to be? • Relatedly, much of modernism involved a kind of explicit repudiation of cultural continuity and represented a schism with prior practices. This is maybe most evident in American architecture, where the International Style exhibition in 1932 initiated the displacement of a rich tapestry of prior styles. This cultural break seems important and interesting to me, and I suspect that the rejection had important consequences outside of the aesthetic domain. Samuel Hughes has been exploring this question in his recent writing at @WorksInProgMag; @RuxandraTeslo is also pulling on this thread. Elaine Scarry wrote about how beauty inspires creation. If so, the inverse may also be true: ugliness inhibits it. • It’s clearly the case that changes in the aesthetic domain can at least inspire progress in other places. Petrarch helped set some of the preconditions for the Renaissance which in turn fostered the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. Things like World Fairs (the 1851 Fair at the Crystal Palace recorded 6 million admissions when the population was 21 million) reflect the popular interdependency that used to exist between aesthetics and material development. • @tedgioia and others have written about stuck culture and how so many domains seem to have ceased to straightforwardly advance in the way that they did up until the nineties or thereabouts. This is obviously peculiar and interesting. What changed, and what does it mean? Is it about the internet and fragmentation? Is it about a loss of supply? Is it just about having reached the zenith of various mediums? • I’m generally interested in markets and the dynamics of creation. In aesthetics broadly, I find the reflexivity between supply- and demand-side factors to be very thought-provoking. There’s a natural desire to view satisfaction of individual preferences as the yardstick to measure market success, but things get interesting and even a bit unsettling when we start to think about how the supply might start to shape the demand. I often think about this in the context of food. Why is food so much worse in Germany than many of its neighbors? Germany certainly doesn’t have less material ability to produce good food; indeed, Germany is richer than the countries around it. There’s probably something about German food supply chains that is impoverished relative to France and Italy, but the Germans themselves don’t seem too upset about it. It just seems that the Germans are stuck in an objectively worse market equilibrium than their neighbors: the food is bad and they’ve gotten used to it. The obvious question then is where else these kinds of reflexive patterns apply, and where else we’re stuck in some objectively inferior equilibrium, even if preferences are in some superficial sense being sated. • While this is an extremely banal and obvious point, I hadn’t until recently thought much about or internalized how much one can study reasonably objective things ("the status of women in society", say) through artwork. (Thanks to @_alice_evans for opening my eyes here.) In this vein, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities over the coming years in computational art analysis. I want something that’s conceptually similar to Google Ngram timelines but for the visual arts. • We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides. (Also, excellent people want to do great work because it is intrinsically satisfying. Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight avoids having to justify every assessment with some kind of torturous empiricism.) • In his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn said that, among the Platonic virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty, that beauty is special, for it possesses a unique kind of irrefutability. He notes that arguments, writing, and philosophical systems can all be predicated on misapprehensions, but that “a true work of art carries its verification within itself.” He proceeds to observe that when goodness and truth are threatened, the “ever surprising shoots of beauty will still force their way through.” There is a lot of specious and motivated reasoning in the world today and plenty of questionable value systems. I don’t think that beauty directly reflects any definitive trait, but I’m intrigued by the idea that it can be a marker of deeper metaphysical coherence.

What causes stagnation in the built world is one of the key questions of our era. In this month’s @WorksInProgMag, @SCP_Hughes argues quite convincingly that some of today's housing shortage is downstream of aesthetic choices. In particular, he shows that the abruptly ugly turn of postwar architecture triggered a regulatory backlash in the form of the conservation movement, which in turn stymied construction and development in urban environments across the West: It may seem tendentious to flatly declare postwar construction ugly, but survey data is quite consistent on this point. Indeed, the sentiment is so widespread that it has spawned the Tartaria conspiracy theory. While the idea that people didn’t like the modernist construction of the postwar years is not by itself a new finding, Hughes teases out the particulars of the causality and shows how this popular rejection led to ensuing stagnation. This essay builds on Hughes’s prior work (“The beauty of concrete” and “Cheap ornament and status games”), and is I think an important contribution for anyone who cares about material progress.

It's been interesting and puzzling to witness the problems with accuracy in UK economic statistics over the past few years. (See the links in the next tweet for more.) It seems that the Office for National Statistics, ONS, now struggles to effectively measure basic figures such as employment, trade, and inflation. This resulted in a quite scathing government report published last summer, where Robert Devereux, a former permanent secretary, concluded that "most of the well-publicised problems with core economic statistics are the consequence of ONS’s own performance." There's a lot of discussion about the travails facing the UK these days (including this big piece in The Atlantic a few weeks ago[1]), and the problems with the ONS feel like an unsettling microcosm of diffuse decline in broader institutional competence. Anyhow: at Stripe, we became curious about the UK's published entrepreneurship data. While we observe a boom in many parts of the world, official figures don't show a similar increase in the UK. In the latest Stripe Economics post, we dug into the data, and, as far as we can tell, the official figures are probably misleading. The good and the bad news (mostly good, I think!) is that the UK is almost certainly witnessing an unmeasured boom in entrepreneurship: UK-specific issues aside, I suspect that this measurement question is illustrative of forthcoming econometric challenges. Keeping the world's macro indicators up-to-date in response to the faster-than-usual changes wrought by AI will be both increasingly difficult and increasingly important in the coming years. [1]

Pretty cool I just pasted the post into Grok CLI which can read X It used my dedicated wallet and downloaded it in less than a minute Asked it to forward it to my kindle Love it

I've been enjoying Victoria Whitworth's new work, The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma. I've actually never seen the Book of Kells in person, somewhat to my embarrassment. I've been doing some reading about the origins of Christianity this year, however, and I figured I should know something about the most famous Irish manuscript. (Perhaps the most famous manuscript, full stop.) Reading the book, I was struck by how much the contents have suffered over the past ~1200 years (enduring everything from water damage to reckless malfeasance in attempted nineteenth century restoration), and I wondered whether AI could help give a sense for how the work might originally have appeared. I downloaded the Internet Archive's PDF and asked my friendly neighborhood agent to use gpt-image-2 to render each page the way it imagines it might have originally appeared. Remarkably, this all worked with a single prompt, with the agent spinning up 48 workers, since each page took a minute or two. (I'm sure that someone wiser than me could prompt the model better, ensuring somewhat more historical accuracy in color restoration and so forth. There is no gold leaf in the Book of Kells!) This part of the project went from conception to completion before I'd finished my morning coffee. I then wanted some easy way to view the results online, so I asked Stripe Projects ( to host the result on Vercel. That also worked in basically a single prompt: I also figured that people might want an easy way to download the full PDF of updated images, but it's a large (~200MB) file, so I decided that I should charge $0.10 to cover bandwidth costs using @MPP. I asked my agent to set this up, and it basically worked smoothly, though I had to tell it what MPP is (I guess it's not yet in the pretrain) and also manually set up the Cloudflare account that actually hosts the PDF and configure the API key. (Vercel seemingly has a 100MB limit.) The purchases now show up in my Stripe account alongside all other activity. The site now has a ready-made agent prompt for anyone who wants to download the whole thing. I'm guessing that we'll see a lot more UIs like this in the future. I remain pretty intrigued by the intersection of agents, micropayments, and stablecoins. I don't know much about managing crypto wallets from the CLI, but now AI can do that for me, while Stripe seamlessly handles turning it all back into fiat. So what is the moral of the story? • Whitworth's book is very good, and you should buy it. • The Internet Archive continues to be wonderful and a civilizational treasure. • While there are rough edges, setting up third-party services via the CLI now basically works. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered with any of this if I couldn't have outsourced almost all of the work to AI. • The image models have gotten very good. • There will probably continue to be all kinds of interesting applications of AI to history. (The Vesuvius Challenge of course being a shining pioneer.) • These days, I often find myself building single-use sites for things I'm learning or for books I'm reading. I think this is a cool new category of software.

Links post from @RichardHanania, noting: "A very high portion of the links comes from Works in Progress, which I think has become in essence the most must-read thing on the internet."

As someone who lives in Portugal which already stops every single package you get from outside EU with no exceptions for a decade or more: I can tell you how this will go From now on if you receive a package from outside EU, it'll first go missing for weeks and nobody will know where it is, then you'll receive an email from your country's customs agency They'll make you login to some extremely unusable and outdated web portal which breaks half the time and where you have to classify your shipment in one of 10,000 confusing category codes Depending on the category code you'll pay a different tax rate, sometimes it's 5% sometimes it's 60% Then you have to pay the customs duty in some archaic way that will also be broken half the time And then you'll finally receive your package from outside EU after months Experiencing this for a few times you'll realize you will never ever try to order or receive anything from outside EU ever because the ordeal is too painful and expensive I get asked a lot here by people from US to test out new products (like the guy who made the Minimal Phone) and it's just literally impossible for me to receive it even for testing. I tried to classify it as samples for testing but you need to go through a bureaucratic process of insane lengths to get that through so I just gave up Realistically all this does is make Europeans live even more in the stone ages, as now they can't use modern AI, nor get modern products from outside EU because it'll be too much hassle to order

Start assembling your team because the 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge officially kicks off on Thursday, August 20. This is round two of our global competition to understand and predict how cells respond to internal cues and external stimuli. Expect a new problem to solve, a wider range of metrics, and a $100,000 grand prize. We look forward to sharing more details at launch.

Very excited to see this new effort from Stripe, Visa, Coinbase, Mastercard, Amex, Blackrock, and many others to build a new open stablecoin that shares economics back to users and distributors. OpenUSD will be natively issued on Tempo on day 1!

1/ Today, we announced Visa is joining Open Standard alongside Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, American Express, Blackrock, US Bank, BBVA, Standard Chartered and 100+ initial partners with the mission of issuing Open USD, a shared stablecoin designed for the global financial system.

Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of NYC, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970. Since then, land values have grown by 30x but land reclamation has ground to a halt. This failure follows the spread environmental law around the world rather than any geographic, technological, or economic constraint. Thus, our lack of land reclamation and the severe land constraints in our most important cities are self-imposed and avoidable. We should make more land! Land reclamation was common practice in American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Charleston, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, DC, Oakland, and LA all had major land reclamation projects that extended residential living space or infrastructure or both. The Bay Area alone reclaimed an area of land equivalent to ten Manhattans between 1850 and 1957, at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330,000 per acre. Today, an acre of single-family-zoned land in San Francisco County averages $24 million. Even if the cost of land reclamation grew faster than inflation, despite technological leaps in dredging and construction technology, there should be plenty of room for profitable arbitrage. And yet, land reclamation is extinct in the Bay Area as well as in every other American city. This isn’t because we ran out of good spots to reclaim: Two thirds of the San Francisco Bay is shallower than Boston’s Back Bay was when it was reclaimed in the 1860s. Nor is it because of better transportation: We’ve used up all of the easy suburban expansions enabled by the train and the automobile so prices are rising even in outlying suburbs. Instead, land reclamation’s death is due to environmental law. Evidence for this claim shows up in the coincident timing of land reclamation’s demise across dozens of cities in the US and in the environmental compliance process of the few reclamation projects still inching along today, but the best evidence is found internationally. No country has more experience or more reason to reclaim land than the Netherlands. The Dutch built 5% of their country out of the sea over the first half of the 20th century and by 1975 they had another artificial lake in the Zuiderzee ready to drain at the flip of a switch, which would have made tens of thousands of acres of land just east of Amsterdam. But a 1969 environmental review law, similar to NEPA in the US, stopped the project before it was finished and the site is now a protected bird sanctuary. Their one major reclamation since, the Maasvlakte 2 extension of the port of Rotterdam, took 11 years and 6,000 pages of environmental review before construction began. Inversely, countries without these laws, like China, Singapore, and Japan have continued major land reclamation projects into the 21st century. China has reclaimed over 5,000 square kilometers since 2000, including a city of half a million outside Shanghai and Singapore has grown by a quarter since 1975. Every major American city has a land shortage. But we have more than enough shallow water, dredging capacity, and market incentive to make more land, just like we did 150 years ago. The only obstacle is our own choice to make making land illegal. The benefits of more land in our most productive cities are large enough to justify the effort of reforming the laws that currently prevent it. Let’s make more land!

I (and a bunch of my colleagues) donated to this. I think it is a really excellent initiative. TLDR: - Equity investments in broad spectrum preventatives that are ready to get to phase 2 within 4 years - Grants for basic research that isn't yet ready for commercial viability - Prove out air cleaning tech (like far-uvc), and make it extremely obvious whether it should be adopted in schools, workplaces etc.

Imagine programming protein, DNA, and RNA systems like you would write computer code, or even by natural language prompting of an AI agent. @brianhie and team just made this a reality with Proto: a high-level programming language for generative biology.

SpaceX just agreed to buy Cursor for $60 billion. Everyone is talking about the product, the models, the valuation. I’m interested in the human side of this AI story. Who built the team behind one of the fastest-growing software companies in history, and how do they think about talent at the frontier of AI? For the first episode of my new podcast, Below the Surface, I sat down with @wardadamp, @Cursor 's Head of Talent, to find out. Before Cursor, Adam helped scale Facebook through its IPO, ran global recruiting at Pinterest from 200 to 2000+ people, and built Growth by Design Talent, the advisory firm behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Notion, and Figma … until Cursor acquired it last year. We talked about what hiring looks like when the market is moving this fast, how Cursor does it differently, and what it actually takes to build a high-performance team right now. One of my biggest takeaways: the companies that win in AI won’t just have better models. They’ll have better systems for finding, assessing, and enabling exceptional people. Watch the full episode here: Or subscribe wherever you get podcasts: 🎧 🎤