Posted inEditor's Pick

The Power of Shit

Can modern society evolve and see poop as a natural, fully renewable, and sustainable resource? Lina Zeldovich explores the ancient societies that understood and saw the potential in human excrement, and the forward-thinking ways we can use our own dark matter for good. With so much smart tech, why haven’t we closed our metabolic rift? […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

‘Where the Bats Hung Out’: How a Basement Hideaway at UC Berkeley Nurtured a Generation of Blind Innovators

For decades, an underground hideaway at UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library — better known as “The Cave” — gave rise to a generation of blind leaders, including Joshua Miele, a MacArthur genius grant winner who now builds adaptive technologies at Amazon. The Cave was where iron sharpened iron, academically — tricks for surviving Berkeley were as […]

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

Which Kind of Failure Are You?

Clay Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be […]