Nathanael Yellis

Who can forget the invasion of Afghanistan in the months after 9/11 or the ignoble end to it in August 2021?

Whenever you see hockey-stick growth, you have to wonder why. In 2010, why did everything need to be a daily deals website? Why did every category suddenly need new luxury DTC brands? Why is everyone on Tiktok?

Are things getting better or worse? By some measures, now is the best time ever to be alive: people have never been healthier or wealthier or longer-lived; by other measures, it seems grim: teenagers, especially girls, have never been more depressed or suicidal, and people of all ages report fewer real friends and participation in robust communities. We're coming apart, inside and out, at a time when we might expect to be doing our best.

People at a certain kind of growing software company are always asking if a thing will scale. You can win meetings by asking the question, "will it scale?" every so often.

I'm a sucker for fake trends and the sorts of cool, simple explanations of complex phenomena that have to be mostly false. Generational analysis usually fits the latter category: the idea that all Americans born between 1995 and whenever share traits is a composition fallacy. Some of the "Greatest Generation" were cowards and some of the Boomers were selfless heroes: I don't think you can accurately and completely generalize groups of people by birth year.

This week, we're returning to some of the topics that have always popped up in this email: tech and politics.

Peggy Noonan's column on Prince Harry, published last week, ended with a broader thought about privacy. It has all of the pearl-clutching and "back in my day" of a good Noonan column, but I think her point is worth quoting at length: