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Tech Culture

Borrowed Prestige: How Rome's Education Debt Spiral Previewed Our Own

Ancient Rome built a system where ambitious families borrowed heavily to fund the kind of elite education that opened doors to power — and then watched that system buckle under its own weight. The collapse didn't happen overnight, and the warning signs looked a lot like your Twitter feed. Here's what five thousand years of data actually predicts about where we're headed.

Mar 13, 2026

Tech Culture

Kids These Days: The 5,000-Year-Old Complaint That Never Gets Old

A Sumerian scribe was already complaining about disrespectful youth around 2000 BC. Socrates had notes. Medieval monks had notes. Your uncle at Thanksgiving has notes. This is one of the most consistent data points in all of recorded human history — and the psychology behind why it keeps happening explains something important about how we make terrible policy decisions.

Mar 13, 2026

Tech Culture

The Rise, Fall, and Stubborn Resurrection of Digg: The Site That Almost Broke the Internet

Before Reddit became the front page of the internet, there was Digg — a scrappy, user-powered news aggregator that dominated the mid-2000s web and then spectacularly imploded. This is the story of how Digg rose to cultural dominance, lost a war it didn't know it was fighting, and keeps trying to come back from the dead.

Mar 12, 2026