“Technology keeps getting more powerful, but our experience of it gets worse—because the business and cultural layer is about extraction, not improvement.”
Ask A Genius 1613: American Luck, Authoritarian Risk, and Jewish Community in a Fragile Moment
“We have been lucky as a country—but luck is not a permanent defense against instability.”
Ask A Genius 1612: From a 1920s Report Card to Authoritarian Alarm: Found History, Memory, and Power in America
“People tuck things into books—and sometimes they tuck entire histories inside them.”
Ask A Genius 1611: The Paper Clip
“An invention that has fundamentally changed everything—and which we barely notice—is the integrated circuit.”
Ask A Genius 1610: The New York Post, Murdoch’s Media Strategy, and Why James Cameron Chose New Zealand
“It would also exist essentially to irritate liberals every day, which amounts to free publicity.”
Ask A Genius 1609: FBI Resignation, ICE Shooting, and DOJ Stonewalling Claims
“In other words, it resembles stonewalling.”
Ask A Genius 1608: Cosmic Irreversibility, Black Holes, and Entanglement
“The universe exists to create and preserve information.”
Ask A Genius 1607: Charlatan Complex, Perfect Spheres, and Pornfluencers
“If you fall for one kind of bullshit, you are more likely to fall for other types of bullshit.”
Ask A Genius 1606: Symbolism, Strategy, and Second-Term Failures
“Trump’s psychology is its own weather system—symbolic victories ‘count’ to him, even when they mean nothing in reality.”
Ask A Genius 1605: Dog Death, Greenland Threats, and Meaning at Scale
“We might beat biology and then be crushed by technology. From the largest scale, we do not matter much; locally, we matter for a while. The trick is holding grief, politics, and cosmic time in the same frame without losing moral clarity.”
Rick Rosner 