Latest posts
- The Costco theory of the internetMay 28, 2026JA Westenberg
At FedMart, the discount chain Sol Price built in 1950s San Diego, you could buy a can of WD-40 in one size, the big one, and that was the end of the conversation. Anyone who wanted the small can went without. Price called it the intelligent loss of sales: carry
- Why I can't stand the word "driven"May 25, 2026JA Westenberg
A man named Harry Readford once stole close to 1,000 head of cattle from Bowen Downs station in central Queensland and drove them south, down through the Channel Country and along the Strzelecki Track into South Australia - across a stretch of desert the squatters swore no herd could
- Nobody is destined for greatness.May 21, 2026JA Westenberg
Demosthenes lost his first appearance before the Athenian assembly. His voice came out thin and failed him mid-sentence, and the crowd laughed him off the platform. Plutarch tells us he walked home with his cloak pulled over his face, certain his public life had ended before it started. What he
- How to be inspired without copyingMay 17, 2026JA Westenberg
In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach sat down at his desk in Weimar and began copying out concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed them note for note, in his own hand, working through at least nine of the L'estro armonico concertos like a medical student dissecting a cadaver. The
- Position or Perish: The Narrative BlueprintMay 12, 2026JA Westenberg
Avis was losing $3.2 million a year; and they'd been unprofitable for thirteen straight. In 1962, they sat at number two in American car rental, well behind Hertz, with no plausible path to catching up. Robert Townsend, the new president, hired Doyle Dane Bernbach and asked
- Fear is information.May 11, 2026JA Westenberg
The motivational industry has built any number of small empires on the notion that fear is a problem to be either managed, suppressed or out-manoeuvred. Fight the fear, etc. The language is typically martial - as if fear were a hostile enemy, camped at the gates of your better self.
- The war between fast and legitimate is hereMay 07, 2026JA Westenberg
The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of “high-risk” systems, the systems in question had moved twice and grown various new appendages. The regulators
- Emotional regulation is a dying art.May 06, 2026JA Westenberg
There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree - hard - in a meeting and walk out with our faces still attached. When bad news arrived at the dinner table, we finished the meal anyway. In hindsight, you could call
- Outrage is letting someone else set the frameMay 05, 2026JA Westenberg
William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The pages manufactured a mood, and that mood sold papers. Three years later, when his correspondent Frederic Remington cabled from
- On wintering.Apr 29, 2026JA Westenberg
The winterer is out of the loop; they're not maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain. They can do work that takes longer than a quarter, longer than a year, longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.
- The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen againApr 27, 2026JA Westenberg
We keep replaying the same human mistakes -bubbles, strongmen, scapegoats, and panics -because the operating system in our skulls hasn’t updated in ten thousand years.
- Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decayApr 23, 2026JA Westenberg
Prediction markets are the clearest single sign our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage. The reason isn't that they're new or sinister. It's that the case for them is defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful, but the long-term effect is corrosive anyway.
- How we lost the living NowApr 20, 2026JA Westenberg
Before 1840, noon in Bristol happened about ten minutes after noon in London, and nobody much cared. The railway needed a common minute or it couldn't run - and that common minute is now a common nanosecond, shipped in real time.
- I truly hate mostpeopleslopApr 16, 2026JA Westenberg
In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck... "The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence." That line, more or less, explains how social media turned into a
- Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shitApr 13, 2026JA Westenberg
In June 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte marched 685,000 soldiers into Russia - the largest military force ever assembled in European history up to that point, and one of the largest military fuckups of all time. He had no coherent supply plan for feeding them, he had no realistic timeline for