Five thousand years of data. Use it.
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.
The men who designed the American constitutional system weren't just casually inspired by Rome — they were obsessed, and they built that obsession directly into the architecture of government. The problem is that their reading of Roman history was selective in ways that leading scholars of their own era flagged at the time. Understanding exactly where they got it right and where they got it wrong explains why several things about American democracy that feel broken and modern are actually broken and ancient.
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.