Category: Life

Do You Trust The Conjurer? (Predictions 2026, #1)

Cecco de Caravaggio The Conjurer (The Musician) c. 1600-1620

The modern English verb ‘to conjure’ is derived from the Latin conjurare, meaning ‘band together by an oath, conspire.’ Its roots con (‘with’) and jur (‘legal right or authority, law’) echo with questions central to our present day struggle with technology: Who do we trust to determine authority? Why do we believe in them?

Conjuring also evokes magic, sorcery, and wonder, essential elements of the tech industry mythos. My earliest pieces on the impact of generative AI leaned on the metaphor of magical “genies” doing our bidding in a relationship bound by loyalty and trust. Do those genies work for us, or are they the product of conjurers beyond our control? Do they demand faith, or instill it?

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Magic and Mayhem (Predictions 2026, #3)

Magic maker

Do you remember the last time you felt the magic? When you encountered something truly novel, something that was both surprising and at the same time deeply familiar, because you had imagined such a thing, but until that very moment, believed it impossible?

I’ve had only a handful of such moments in my long relationship with digital technology. The first was in 1981, when I programmed a game of tic-tac-toe on an underpowered IBM PC. I compiled the crude lines of code I’d been assigned to write, issued the command “RUN” at the C: prompt, and damned if the thing didn’t actually work.

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The Standard, Part 1 – The End and The Beginning

A good place as any to lose your company.

Note: Third in a series. First post, second post.

The Oak Grove cemetery in Tisbury, Massachusetts encompasses roughly ten acres of rolling woodlands and narrow dirt roads. Its 1,800 or so headstones date back two centuries, making Oak Grove a relative newcomer as New England graveyards go. I’ve been visiting this sacred, spectral spot on the island of Martha’s Vineyard for nearly five decades. Half my family is buried there. 

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Get Wired: The Launch (1992-93)

The launch issue of Wired.

(continuation of a previous post)

If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding – everyone tells you to enjoy it, to remember every detail. But decades later, all you can recall is leaving the reception, relieved that everyone seemed to have a good time. 

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One Fateful Phone Call: How I Ended Up At Wired

The Iron Door, California’s Oldest Saloon. (It had a pay phone in the back).

Living at the cutting edge of technology in the early ’90s required either a magical token forged of copper and silver, or the capacity to memorize a ridiculously long string of numbers. Either the token or the code would connect you to a vast telecommunications network driven by immense computers housed in bunker-like buildings scattered around the world.

Labor Day 1992. I squeezed into a pay phone behind the oldest bar in California, The Iron Door, pride of Groveland, California – the “gateway to Yosemite.” I never could remember my access code, but I did have a token – also known as a quarter – which I slipped into the pay phone, then dialed my voicemail, a state of the art service that cost me an extra five bucks a month. Back then everybody used voicemail, it was an asynchronous lifeline to the rest of the world.

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Wait, What’s This DOC Thing You’re Doing?!

An old friend asked me what I was up to the other day, and despite two years having passed since I started getting that question (here’s my first post on the subject), I realized I’ve not made much progress on a concise answer. Usually I’ll list the various projects that currently fill my day – working on the P&G Signal conference, trying my best to be a good board member at a number of media, tech, and data companies, managing various investments, and running a new health event I co-founded last year called DOC. 

“Wait,” my friends invariably ask. “Why are you involved in a health project?!”

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The University of Peers and Elders

For the past ten or so years I’ve harbored a mostly secret desire to return to graduate school. Part of this is because I’m a frustrated academic – when I was a senior in college, I seriously considered the PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley, thinking I’d write a masterful ethnography of the nascent technology industry. But I was put off by a doctoral candidate’s admonition that, should I choose her path, I “better get used to eating ramen for the next seven years.” 

Instead I went to work covering the tech industry as a reporter, then pursued a Master’s in Journalism, also at Berkeley. Despite its status as a two-year program replete with a thesis, journalism at Berkeley – or anywhere – happens to be one of the least academic fields of study possible. I did write a rather lengthy (and quite dry) paper on the future of publishing as it relates to new digital technologies. But by the time I was finished, all I really wanted to do was start a magazine. 

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What I’ve Been Up To This Past Year: DOC

We’ve been building something.

It’s been quiet here for a few months. Yesterday I posted a longish piece on LinkedIn explaining why, and for those of you wondering what I’ve been up to lately, I figured I’d repost it here….

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Introducing DOC

Late last year I wrote about my transition from being work-driven to being life-driven. It hit a chord – many of you are on similar journeys, particularly those of us who are looking toward, and past, middle age. Buried a couple of thousand words into that post, in the section about what I was up to after selling The Recount, was this line: “I’m helping to stand up a new kind of gathering at the intersection of science, medicine, and longevity.” My partners and I have spent the past six months developing that gathering, and I’m very proud to announce it’s got a name, a date, and most importantly, a program with a purpose.

My co-founders Dr. Jordan Shlain and Kevin Ryan and I have christened the community we’re forming DOC. Our inaugural gathering is October 24th – 26th at The Estate Yountville in Napa, California. DOC is invitation only and close to full, but if you’re interested in learning more, you can request an invite here.

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Wrestling With The Gray Lady

Find the Search button…

The other day my wife and I heard a report on our local public radio station that mentioned the Biden Administration’s American Climate Corps (ACC) initiative, a new program seeking to recruit 20,000 young people into jobs on the front line of the climate crisis. Modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-Era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the program is a signature element of Biden’s response to what anyone with a pulse knows is the most pressing issue of our day: we’re destroying the planet through misguided economic incentives.

But despite the fact that the ACC was launched with much fanfare last Fall, my wife and I had never heard of it. We have three young adult children whose future feels in doubt because of climate change, and they’d never heard of it either – not a good sign for a program that hopes to recruit tens of thousands of people just like them. All five of us feel like we’re reasonably well informed. I mean, we read The New York Times, don’t we?

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