Masha Gessen on American friendships: Russian friendships are much more emotional and intense than American friendships. When I moved back to this country five and a half years ago, it was like this sense of whiplash because I had a lot of friends here, but I had been absent for 20 years. I would get… Read more

I have encountered and lived in several communities that have the following two properties: They produce a lot of weird, novel ideas. A reasonable set of the people in them are extremely overconfident. I think this is no coincidence, and I think having norms of “epistemic modesty” likely breeds out the production of novel ideas.… Read more