How Silica Gel Took Over the World
Silica gel packets seem like the only thing keeping our packaged food crispy and our belongings free of mildew. How on earth did they all get here?
Scope Creep, 2025-03-18.
Its borders are weird.
Alexis, Oakland, and the Port
In ways that are almost spooky, Oakland ends up concentrating so many of the problems of the Bay Area
Reliability Compounds
The magical fact isn’t that we have jet planes. It’s that modern airliners are reliable to the tune of one accident per 1.13 million flights.
Postcards, Part 10
Doing it badly, over and over.
Notes, 2025-03-03
If you want to make a strong slingshot out of wood, you need to find a good forked branch to start with.