Avital Balwit

I feel profoundly American when I travel to Germany. I was only a few hours off the plane when I started to notice it. Someone in our group at Don Giovanni had to sit next to a stranger, a big conundrum for my German party. I couldn't care less, so I left my clump of conferring Germans and took my seat, gave him a smile, and forgot about it. Then we had questions about the second half of the program. The group went back to conferring over this difficult problem. I strode over

This is the post I wish someone had sent me as a freshman in college. I get a lot of mentorship emails. I probably call with one in ten of them somewhat randomly based on how much time and energy I have that given week, and I ignore the rest -- and I feel very bad about it. This post is some advice that I would give to those seekers. Does it matter what I study in college?  Yes and no. I studied Political and Social Thought, which is neither too closely connected to what I cu

One common reaction to this is that it will lead to a less meaningful life; that without struggle some essential form of human striving will have been lost. I find that argument somewhat appealing, but I'm also curious who decides what the exact optimal amount of struggle is, and for whom. 

Increasing complexity requires increasing delegation. As a company grows, it needs more layers of management to delegate tasks, process...

But it was also worth it because of a piece of advice I received — Anders would tell us again and again: “Go hard to go easy.”

“a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent..." - Middlemarch, Chapter 3

I met someone recently who was a passionate supporter of online ads. I met him in the audience of a lecture. He was speaking to a friend. Wi

This pattern made me think about idea generation more broadly, the pace at which different people produce good, novel ideas, and how we migh

I now use Claude every day, multiple times a day, both in my work and personal life. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: I rarely...

In conversation with Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America. While I have...

The London Review of Books just published my Letter to the Editor. It responds to Rebecca Solnit's "In the Shadow of Silicon Valley" from...