Jonathan Hursh

@bnj @variantui This is a breakthrough, thanks! Any easy way to export to Readymag?

Introducing @variantui Enter an idea and get endless (beautiful) designs as you scroll No canvas, no skills or MCP, no constant prompting Reply if you'd like 200 free designs to give it try

@conductr_ @theJayAlto 7 of the 7 articles written by western men. The world is so much bigger than western men.

this is where I get some of my ideas from. i highly recommend consuming high quality content.

@jasonhickel We need a new Planetary Party° for the seventh generation – planetaryparty.co.

@suekhim @akothari Agree! We're launching earthbuild.co, a new planetary institution to help members focus on 100 Year Projects. DM?

@akothari I believe most people do want to work on more pressing problems. It will require a big shift in personal and collective values to escape the current attractor. It’s a trite observation now, but we’ve raised our best to be averse to risk and real possibility of failure.

Why do we keep dedicating our brightest minds, billions of dollars, and the most powerful GPUs on earth to building yet another app that optimizes for attention decay? I was hopeful when ChatGPT seemed to reclaim time from TikTok and Instagram. It felt useful, even nourishing. But now we see disposable video, same engagement treadmill and path to ads? If even our “nonprofits” can’t resist this gravity, what does that say about us?

@RnaudBertrand Look who's in the background.

This is a strong contender for the most self-destructive tweet of all times.

"Breakneck begins with a bike ride I took from Guiyang to Chongqing in 2021. China’s fourth-poorest province, I was delighted to find, has much better infrastructure than California or New York, both wealthier by orders of magnitude." danwang.co

The thoughts beyond the thought – the replies – is what is most valuable about X/Twitter.

@NWischoff Create and print an Experience Passport with experiences you’d like to expose them to and many blank pages for their own ideas as they grow older. Customize a stamp. DM if you want a template!

My son is turning one next month. Didn’t have any family traditions growing up and really want them for our family. Please share any super fun/memorable family traditions for birthdays, holidays or just random things you loved from your childhood.

@xanderburgess Earthbuild — a members club for Gens XYZ building the planetary era for the Majority World. earthbuild.co

For the next 24 hours reply with your brand name/website and i'll handcraft a logo for you — (incl. rights & logo files)

@ashleymayer @helen_min @sallyshin @macbohannon @greatchatpod Fantastic!

Some personal news: @helen_min, @sallyshin, @macbohannon, Angela Du (too cool for X) and I are finally joining the podcast party. We didn’t mean to start a podcast, but a fun and feisty dinner in 2024 turned into an unhinged group chat and weekly zoom hang. We bonded over our love of deconstructing the tech industry’s latest drama (2025 really over delivers) and our disenchantment with the loudest voices shaping the narrative for tech. Apparently you can just do things, so today we’re launching @greatchatpod, a podcast mostly about tech. As operators, we’ve scaled startups from incubation to unicorn rounds and IPOs. As investors, we’ve started our own firms and worked at the very largest VC platforms. We’ve worked in and with media, and bring a unique view on the stories behind the headlines. With Great Chat, we’re hoping to create something fun and useful that helps the next generation building and funding startups make sense of this crazy, amazing, high stakes moment we’re all in. So if you prefer your pro-tech, pro-capitalist commentary served without a side of disgruntled billionaire, check us out! First episode just dropped: we debate whether a personal brand is now table stakes for venture investors, cover the latest on LLMs, and Angela confesses to hoarding eggs. greatchatpod.com

@jenzhuscott This could be used for daily battery replacements as well.

Parking robots. I need a couple of these. Hate to prove any Asian women stereotypes but I really suck at parking 😂 I am good at math though. 😅

This will transform the Majority World.

@gunsnrosesgirl3 The Ministry for the Future

What's a book you think everyone should read at least once in their lifetime?

@gunsnrosesgirl3 Shantaram

@esthercrawford Can you describe what culture Meta is attempting to shift to?

It’s fascinating being on the inside of another company going through a major cultural reset. First at Twitter, now at Meta. These moments demand adaptability and a willingness to move beyond the norms and processes that you’re used to. Fighting for what was is a waste of energy, so there are only two real choices: 1. Leave if you no longer believe in the company’s values or mission. 2. Lean in and focus on building what’s next with optimism and intention. The worst response is to do nothing but complain. The future will always belong to the people who focus on solutions, not problems. Resetting culture and expectations is one of the hardest, yet most impactful, things leaders can take on. Over time, habits and assumptions calcify into the status quo. What worked in one chapter of a company’s life can become its biggest problem in the next. Company culture is not fixed. It can quickly and drastically shift when leadership has the power and courage to realign incentive structures. After all, work is a game and whatever gets rewarded is what people inevitably optimize for. Too many people get stuck expecting stability and resist change when it comes. But chaos isn’t the enemy, and in fact, it can be when the most important work happens. In chaos nothing feels certain. Plans fall apart, priorities shift, and everyone scrambles to make sense of what’s going on. But this is also when weak systems fail and are replaced, new ideas are tested, and clarity emerges. Control is an illusion. What matters is your ability to evolve, learn, and meaningfully contribute to what comes next.

@RnaudBertrand Dropped your post in Notebook LLM to generate a podcast. It changed my initial reaction to your article. You've created an interesting (and provocative) scaffolding in how to think about China's governance.

Many people dismiss China as a one-party state but the reality is actually much more nuanced than this. As I've often argued you cannot possibly understand something - let alone criticize it - if you don't also understand it from the standpoint of those who defend it. Meaning, in this instance, that if you only ever hear about China's system from the standpoint of its detractors, you cannot possibly have an intellectually honest understanding of it. The honest thing to do is hear about the system from both "sides" and make up your own mind about it. Anyone with common sense can agree to this. And this is actually normally supposed to be the standard scholastic method of disputatio (structured debate) in the classical West: first you present your opponent's position in its strongest form and demonstrate that you truly understand it, then and only then can you proceed to critique it. Otherwise you risk simply attacking a straw man version of their position. In this spirit, let's look at a recent Qiushi article (en.qstheory.cn/2024-12/10/c_1…) - Qiushi is the official theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the CPC - that explains how China views its "Political Party System". First of all, people might be surprised that China doesn't have one party but 9 official parties: the CPC and 8 other parties. The article makes an interesting historical case for why this system emerged. After the 1911 revolution that ended imperial rule (which the article calls a "autocratic monarchic" system that was "semi-feudal"), China experimented with Western-style parliamentary democracy. The result, according to the article, was chaos - in just 16 years, China went through 10 different heads of state, 45 cabinets, and 59 prime ministers. The longest-serving prime minister held office for less than a year, while the shortest served for less than a day. Then they tried one-party rule under the Kuomintang (KMT), which ended in "economic collapse, political isolation, and military defeat." This historical experience led China to seek a different path - what the article calls a "new type of political party system." Rather than having parties compete for power as in the West, or having a single party monopolize power, China developed a system where multiple parties exist but in a cooperative rather than competitive relationship. To be fair, the CPC does have a monopoly on power in a big way, and the Qiushi article admits this. It explicitly states that "leadership by the CPC is the defining feature of China's new type of political party system" and that working with the CPC is "the fundamental political basis for multiparty cooperation." But this gets to a crucial point: we're enormously confused when we try to understand the Chinese system through our vision of the CPC as a political party like the Democrats or Republicans. In China's system, the CPC isn't really equivalent to a Western political party but rather to the constitutional order itself. It functions not as a competitor for power but as what the article calls the "highest force for political leadership." This helps us understand the role of the eight other parties. They're not meant to be opposition parties or potential alternatives to CPC rule. Instead, they serve as channels for different sectors of society to participate in governance through consultation and cooperation. The article describes them as "participating parties" who act as "effective advisers, helpers, and partners to the CPC." This might sound like mere window dressing to Western ears - indeed, many critics like Aaron Friedberg argue these parties exist solely to "create the illusion of inclusiveness and representation." But I think this misses something important about how these parties actually function. First, many of these parties have genuine historical roots predating the PRC. The China Democratic League, for instance, - which is the biggest of these "minor parties" with about 350,000 members - was founded in 1941 as a "third force" seeking a middle path between the KMT and CPC. The Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, another party with about 160,000 members, emerged from the left wing of the KMT that opposed Chiang Kai-shek. These weren't artificial creations of the CPC but political movements with their own historical trajectories that eventually found their place in China's current system. Secondly, these parties play a specialized role in China's governance. They have seats in the National People's Congress and its Standing Committee, and participate in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. The Qiushi article describes how they conduct research and offer policy suggestions on major initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative and rural revitalization strategy. Each party tends to represent specific constituencies - the China Democratic League focuses on intellectuals in education and culture, the Jiusan Society (211,000 members) represents scientists and technologists, while the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang works on cross-strait relations with Taiwan. They serve as channels for these professional and social groups to have input into governance. This ties back to what I explained in my previous post about China's "whole-process people's democracy" (x.com/RnaudBertrand/…). Rather than seeing democracy as periodic competition between parties, China's system emphasizes continuous consultation and input from different sectors of society. These minor parties are one of the institutional mechanisms for this consultation. In effect, they are a bit like a mix between professional associations, think tanks, and government advisory bodies - but with a formal political role that includes seats in the legislature. They're more institutionalized than Western lobbies or interest groups, but less powerful than opposition parties in liberal democracies. And they are expected to think about the national interest rather than just advocate for their sector's interests. As the article puts it, the aim of the system is "to pursue common goals" rather than pursuing narrow sectoral interests. The Qiushi article frames this as avoiding both the "inadequate oversight in one-party rule" and the "destructive competition" seen in Western systems. Whether you agree with this framing or not, it represents a distinctly Chinese approach to political representation - one focused on consultation and consensus-building rather than competition and alternation of power. It's all to easy - and wrong - to dismiss these parties as purely decorative. They provide specialized expertise, represent specific constituencies, and offer channels for different sectors of society to have input into governance, albeit in a consultative rather than competitive way. In my post on China's "whole-process people's democracy" (x.com/RnaudBertrand/…) I explained that the best way for a Westerner to think of China's system isn't as a one-party state, nor frankly as a system that has multiple parties because I think it's confusing, but rather as a zero-party state. What I mean by this is that in Western democracies, political parties compete to temporarily control the state apparatus through elections, but in China, the CPC effectively is the state apparatus - it functions not as a political party in the Western sense but as the permanent embodiment of the state and constitutional order itself. Through this lens, the other eight parties aren't really "parties" in the Western sense either, but rather function more like formalized consultative bodies representing different sectors of society within this constitutional framework. These "parties" are just one of many mechanisms that China uses for consultation and feedback in what it calls its 'whole-process people's democracy.' There's also things like residents' committees and village committees at the grassroots level, various channels for citizens to report issues or provide policy suggestions, and of course the 100 million CPC members themselves who live among the population and are meant to understand and relay people's needs. All forming an extremely complex and intricate mechanism for constant policy adjustment based on societal feedback and needs. To conclude, the point here isn't to say that this system is better or worse than Western liberal democracy. My personal opinion is that the Chinese system is so deeply rooted in Chinese culture, history and traditions that it can only fit China - which is precisely why we should try to understand this system on its own terms.

@patrickc No reads from the Majority World? So much more human history than just the West.

This year, I read ten important historical novels: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain. Reflections: • Four of these are more than 800 pages long. The Magic Mountain and Portrait of a Lady, while shorter, are not short. Of the ten, 5 are British, 2 are Russian, and there was one from each of France, Germany, and the US. • For me the clear standouts are Middlemarch, Bleak House, Karenina, and Life and Fate. I would enthusiastically reread any of them. If I had to choose just one to go to again, I would probably select Middlemarch. There's something memorably compelling in Eliot's affection and empathy for almost all of her characters. If Succession is a show with no likable personalities, Middlemarch is the opposite. Bleak House is a close second. Life and Fate is quite different to the others: it’s not exactly entertaining (or even notably well-written), but it is true and profound. (Most works designated “important” are not, but Life and Fate surely merits that as well.) If kindness is one of the core adjurations of Life and Fate, Eliot is the author that most embodies it. • I'd underestimated Dickens's lyricism. I had thought of him as a master of the plot (contra Nabokov), but he is just as accomplished in prose itself. “Chesney Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in corners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock ancestors retire from the light of day again. Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow. Let the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rain beats, the windows rattle, and the chimneys growl. Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds. On all the house there is a cold, blank smell like the smell of a little church, though something dryer, suggesting that the dead and buried Dedlocks walk there in the long nights and leave the flavour of their graves behind them.” • Three of these four were written by authors in their 50s (Eliot, Tolstoy, and Grossman). Dickens was a mere 41 -- and this shows. The plot is very entertaining, and immensely intricate, but the characters are somehow flatter. So, maybe one lesson from the set is simply that wisdom is real, and that skill in the domain of fiction compounds for quite some time. • Russian literature puzzles me. Why did it suddenly become so good in the 19th century, and why did it decline so much in the 20th? I don't think the latter answer can just be a story of oppression, since we got many great works during Stalin’s reign. But what's the best Russian novel since Master and Margarita? On the issue of the rise, I often encounter explanations claiming that it was related to Russian intellectuals being excluded from political influence and consequently retreating to the artistic domain -- but this feels obviously inadequate. Again, how does this explain the post-Bulgakov decline? And where are the great, say, Saudi works of the past 50 years? • Whatever happened to the novel around the turn of the century (Conrad, Woolf, Mann in my reading) was not obviously salutary. All three are interesting works, and there is something very distinctly modern in Woolf's in particular, but they simply don't compel -- at least for this reader -- the way their predecessors do: maybe it's just the particular selection, but I was generally looking forward to finishing the early 20th century works, and a bit disappointed when completing those dating from before 1900. The dislocation that Blom describes in Vertigo Years is clearly manifest. Woolf's “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” essay, and her claim that “human character changed” in 1910, is consistent with the turn in the novels. She was speaking of different works, but her assessment rings true in a broader way: “Yet what odd books they are! Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction.” • I should note that some of Woolf’s descriptions are great, even if her brooding interiority leaves me ultimately unenthralled. “The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.” “He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.” • Tom Wolfe attributes modern architecture and the international style to a post-1917 sympathy for the proletariat and a desire to strip indulgent bourgeois ornament from our construction, and, yes, Schoenberg explicitly motivated atonality in egalitarian ideals, but this set of novels makes me doubt the political explanations. You can clearly see the embrace of some kind of disharmony in the books, and I don’t think Conrad was trying to make any Marxist point. I still struggle to explain what happened, but I think I would reverse some of the standard causality, and it seems to me that the coopting of communist ideals is probably itself downstream of the broader social unease that also gave rise to these artistic tides. Blom’s description of the rise of various mental disorders -- neurasthenia and the like -- seems relevant. (All of this does make me want to better understand 1848.) • The railway, and its attendant social upheaval, features repeatedly, and maybe most memorably in one chapter of Middlemarch. I hadn't appreciated just how significantly disruptive a force it was perceived as being even at the time. (Given the scale of the construction that was entailed, maybe this shouldn't be surprising.) More broadly, there is some sense of a society in transition through most of these works: these aren't neat and timeless tales. You have the rise of the bourgeois and broader urbanization in Bovary, the emerging social consciousness in Bleak House, the exposure of the shabbiness of Victorianism and its gender expectations in Lighthouse, and the postwar shell shock of Magic Mountain. • The works written before 1900 are primarily about romance (Bleak House the exception, with romance only a subplot), and those written afterwards (Conrad, Mann, Grossman, Woolf) are emphatically not. I don’t know what to make of this. Perhaps just an accident of the selection. • Ruxandra Teslo points out that there’s a moral gravity in the 19th century works that seems foreign today: people treat their own characters as important constructions in their own right. In a similar vein, I was struck by Grossman’s conception of freedom: he perceives it more as the right to self-define than a more typical liberty of action. Perhaps because actions were so circumscribed in Victorian societies (for women) and Soviet societies (for everyone), the seriousness of being weighed heavily. * Money and its mechanics get extensive treatment in the pre-1900 novels. The details of Bovary’s debt were made famous by Piketty, but Eliot also spends time on Lydgate’s financial struggles, and Tolstoy on Levin’s agricultural economics. Pecuniary considerations are absent in the later works. Again, maybe just happenstance stemming from the particular selection, but I don’t get the feeling that it’s just that: I think something about authors’ attitudes to the topic changed. • Today’s scientific papers are far harder to read, and jargon-replete, than those of 1960. However, the novels of the 19th century use significantly more sophisticated construction (and vocabulary) than those of today. What should we make of the countervailing trends? To me, both seem suboptimal. • Pleasure aside, should one read these books? Does one derive moral betterment from doing so? I'm not sure. Probably not in any narrow sense. Ethicists are supposedly no more ethical than regular people -- if deliberate study doesn't help, what hope does mere fiction have? And, anecdotally, I don't consider the humanities majors to be the moral betters of the STEM students. I do think they've helped with my understanding of history, though. This year, I reflected on how the major historical moments that I've lived through -- the weeks after 9/11, the aftermath of Trump's 2016 election victory, March of 2020 -- cannot really be understood in terms of particular events, and must instead be apprehended through the vibes that prevailed. Rather than trying to assemble a logical causal chain, I think it's more helpfully explanatory to see many happenings as simply arising from a mood. History books struggle to capture such sentiments, and understandably so: the historian usually wasn't there; even if they were, vibes are ethereal things, and they feel out-of-place in a work that aspires to footnoted rigor and exactitude. As such, complements are required, and these novels have definitely helped me. This view also makes biography and autobiography seem of greater importance in developing such comprehension. The small details -- that Herbert Hoover's parents used to attend lectures and debates in a nearby town since that was the only entertainment available, that both died before age 35, or that Hoover himself once walked 80 miles in 3 days to join a geology class trip -- say a lot about a period, and are rarely captured in the grand sweep of events. I feel like I gained much more understanding of historical Vienna and of the emotions around WWI from reading Zweig's memoir than from any direct history of the period. • Another argument made for reading these works is to simply better understand humanity and the human experience. There is almost certainly some extent to which this argument is valid, though I always wonder: do they help you better understand humanity, or better understand the kind of people who write books like these? Is Isabel Archer actually reflective of someone in that kind of position, or merely of the kind of hyper-intellectual James family? Karenina is ultimately a kind of demented obsessive (as was Tolstoy) – in learning about her, do we learn about love and its travails, or simply about unusually unstable personalities? • There’s clearly some value in reading them for somewhat tautological reasons: they're worth reading because they are the books that we’ve decided are worth reading. They form part of our cultural context, and other works probably make somewhat more sense and are more memorable when interpreted through their lens. They are intellectual capital cities: you sorta have to go to Paris and New York in order to understand the rest of the world, and whether you “enjoy” them isn’t really the operative question. • Ultimately, a utilitarian case for better understanding history or even humanity would not be my primary argument for why one might choose to read them, though. With self-consciousness about the platitude, they are simply some of the finest intellectual achievements of humanity, and worthy of engagement for that reason alone: a deeper appreciation for excellence is itself a valuable thing.

@spatiallyjess @SkarredGhost Nice! We‘re working with megacities in the Global South. Could we chat? I’m here in San Francisco. DM open.

@SkarredGhost Download here: …o.tokyo-digitaltwin.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/3dmodel/

Today I learned the city of Tokyo released point cloud data of the entire city for free for anyone to download 👀

@jenzhuscott Emergence.

Completely seamless. Fascinating to think each drone’s path is individually calculated yet collectively coordinated.

@ginag @TechCrunch @khoslaventures @lightspeedvp @latitud @lennysan @20vcFund Congrats, Gina!

Yay! @TechCrunch just announced our $13M Seed led by @khoslaventures with @lightspeedvp, @Latitud, @lennysan, @20vcFund and friends. This is the first step toward our mission of making college education accessible and equitable. Come work with us: careers@outsmartcollege.com.