Slowly Changing Everything
August 5, 2026
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Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
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New Work
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the Ceuta Migrant Wave
This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Green Habits & the pod is on Haunted Houses
Slowly Changing Everything
Many of the real-life conversations I’ve had recently have orbited around the theme that everything’s changing, kinda sorta really fast, but also in some ways too slow to accurately perceive.
It’s the boiling frog problem at scale. We can point at little blips here and there, spikes on the graph, but the majority of what’s changing is subtle and pernicious, until one day we wake up and absolutely everything is different, at least in some facet of our lives.
There’s almost certainly a layer of generational myopia at play, here: what generation doesn’t suspect, at some point, that they’re going through the biggest change in history (the implication being that they are very, very special)?
That said, there are periods we can look at in retrospect and say, wow, you guys saw the introduction of the railroad system, electricity, and modern global communications. That’s a pretty big deal and was probably both exciting and confounding to live through.
Exciting and confounding is kind of where I’m at right now, looking out at the world. We seem to be living in both the dumbest possible timeline and an age of wonders, our science and technology blasting us with miracles seemingly on the daily, but our capacity to enjoy (or even be aware of) these things hobbled by the torrent of endless abuses, distortions, price-increases, and failures of previously for-granted-taken assumptions and systemic structures.
And because it’s all happening simultaneously, at a moment in which the nature of trust, information, and knowledge are all being called into question, the experience of all this everything is kind of just exhausting a lot of the time.
Everything is happening so much, and we can barely be bothered to pay attention, because my god, have you been out there? In the world? It’s a full-time job just existing.
I work in the news, literally making part of my living paying attention and trying to understand things so I can explain them to others. This is a moment that’s easy to explain in terms of incentives and cause-effect dynamics, but difficult to parse in terms of where things are going.
It’s an exceedingly interesting time to be alive, in other words, but also immensely uncomfortable and worrisome. And that’s likely to continue to be the case for at least the next half-decade or so, for (hopefully) better and (with unfortunate frequency) worse.
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What Else
I’ve been spending as much time as possible with real-deal humans in the actual, tangible world, of late. That seems to be the best medicine at a moment in which the online world is an uncomfortable mix of some of the best work every produced in human history, elaborate and convincing falsehoods, and mind-numbing/attention-depleting slop.
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