Cognitive Bias
The Risk You Fear Most Is the One You Saw Most Recently
Availability is why a plane crash in the news outweighs a car ride's real odds. The bias isn't that you fear rare things — it's that vividness stands in for probability.
Most read this week
Online Relationships
A Friendship Measured in Reply Times
A friendship that migrated entirely to text and voice notes, and the unspoken contract about how long you can go silent before it means something.
Apps & Tools
The SaaS Pricing Audit I Run Before Any Trial (It Caught a $4,200 Surprise)
A 20-minute checklist for finding the real cost of a SaaS tool before you start a trial — seats, add-ons, overage, and the traps pricing pages hide.
Creators
Most People Do Not Stop Making Things. They Just Stop, and Nobody Knows.
The unannounced disappearance is the standard ending, and it costs the person more than it costs the audience. A case for ending things out loud.
Latest
Full archive
Subscription Creep
Your $12 Subscription Is Really $6 Every Time You Open It
A subscription feels like a flat fee until you divide it by real use, and that one calculation is what turns 'I should probably cancel this' into 'I'm cancelling this today'.
Apps & Tools
The Day You Outgrow a Project Tool's Free Tier
Six project tools, one spreadsheet: I checked each free plan's actual limit and what the smallest paid tier costs per seat, per year. The surprises are in the climbing costs.
Note Systems
Your Note System Dies the Day Someone Else Touches It
A note system built for one brain breaks the moment a second person writes into it. Here is where shared notes fall apart, and the small structure that keeps them alive.
Online Relationships
The Friend You Only Knew Online Is Gone, and There's No Funeral to Attend
When a friendship lived entirely in text, losing it doesn't come with a service or a phone tree. The grief arrives in small, ordinary places instead — read receipts, a group chat going quiet, a suggested contact.
Online Culture
The Report Button Is a Weapon, Not a Shield
The report function pretends to be a safety tool. In practice it's the fastest status move in any community — a lever for silencing rivals and settling fights that moderation was never meant to referee.
Online Relationships
A Friendship Across Twelve Time Zones
Your evening is their morning, and somebody always has to give up a good hour. The quiet logistics of an online friendship with a twelve-hour offset, and what happens when the compromise stops being shared.
Note Systems
A Note Has a Shape: The Six-Line Template That Makes It Findable a Year Later
The reason your notes never resurface isn't the app, it's that you file them with no structure to search against. Here is the six-line template I settled on, and where it breaks.
Apps & Tools
Newsletter Platforms: What "Free" Actually Gets You Before You Pay
I checked the free tiers on Mailchimp, Kit, Buttondown, MailerLite and Beehiiv. One caps you at 100 subscribers, another at 10,000, and "free" hides four different kinds of limits.
Cognitive Bias
Sunk Cost Is the Reason You Finish the Book You Hate
You keep going because you've already paid, and the money you spent is the one thing your future choices can't get back. What the sunk-cost effect is, when it's strongest, and the questions that reliably break it.
Online Culture
The /s Tag and the War Over Sarcasm
Sarcasm dies in text, so someone invented /s — and then people started fighting about it. How a three-character tone marker became a culture war over who gets to decide what a joke means.
Subscription Creep
The Same Subscription Is Two Different Cancellations: App Store vs. the Vendor
Cancelling on a vendor's website doesn't stop an App Store charge, and cancelling in the app often does nothing at all. Why a subscription you bought through Apple or Google is a separate billing relationship you have to close in a different place.
Online Culture
Every Platform Has a Score, Even the Ones That Swear They Don't
Take away the follower count and people invent a new one: reply speed, blue check, who got screenshot first. How invisible leaderboards shape what everyone posts.