21 Results in the "Uncategorized" category
-
It began as a screenplay called Utopia that I wrote in 1996 while studying screenwriting at Tel Aviv University—plot-heavy and built for momentum. Action and then some more action, and a villain who explains their scheme to the hero just before the climactic, you guessed it, action. For a student project, the screenplay was pretty creative. At the centre of it was a pandemic…
-
In 2000, I finished an MA in fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University and did the next most logical thing. I built a software company. The internet was new and exciting at that time, and I had a problem at my nonprofit marketing job that I knew the internet could solve. How do you connect people who care about the same causes and help…
-
There is a kind of reader who reads fiction not to have their existing judgments confirmed but to test them. Someone willing to stay inside moral complexity long enough to understand it, rather than resolving it quickly into a verdict. If you’ve read N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and felt unsettled for days, or read Frank Herbert’s Dune as a study in how power…
-
I’d been having so much fun and frustration writing A Frictionless State, including many nights when I couldn’t stop writing in my head when I should have been sleeping. There was just one problem. I am an unknown novelist asking strangers to trust me with their time. How I addressed that challenge shaped everything about how I decided to publish. The traditional approach is:…
-
Blog
AI in my Inkwell
In the summer of 2025, I was advising founders at a business accelerator in Vancouver on how to incorporate AI into their companies and products. I had thoughts about workflow and the categories of use that were likely to produce real returns versus the ones that were mostly theatre. What I did not have was a personal use case. I had founded and sold…
-
When I decided to adapt Utopia, the screenplay I had written in 1996, into a novel, I expected the challenges to be structural—updating the story for the intervening decades, expanding the world, converting a screenplay into prose. I didn’t expect to discover how much the form itself would change what the story was able to be. Utopia had qualities worth keeping. It moved. It…
-
Blog
A Return Address
I sent the first three chapters out on a Thursday in April. A few hundred people I knew got a personal email from me, people who would open it because they recognised my name in the subject line. Whether they’d read it I had no way to know. What I’m actually waiting for, though, are the moments when strangers arrive at the site with…
-
Chapter
21 — Junction
A closed system cannot tolerate accumulation. Just as a biological organism must excrete toxins to survive, a healthy economic body must have efficient mechanisms for the disposal of non-productive elements. We must not view this expulsion as cruelty, but as a necessary hygiene. The system must be flushed to remain pure. —Naomi Feld, The Economic Renewal Fallacy: A Theory of Replacement The door marked Junction 44 was unlocked. Ari pushed it open. Inside he found a small, circular maintenance hub,…-
103.8 K • Ongoing
-
-
Chapter
19 — Collected
In periods of acute instability, the decisive question is rarely who possesses clean hands. It is who remains capable of binding disparate actors into temporary coherence before fracture becomes irreversible. A rational system must sometimes accept contaminated alliances, partial knowledge, and compromised instruments, provided they are subordinated to the preservation of the whole. —Naomi Feld, Systemic Integrity and the Harmonious State Francis rested her fingertips on the walnut and boxwood…-
103.8 K • Ongoing
-
-
Chapter
18 — Data
Rational self-interest presumes a desire for preservation. Vengeance discards this premise entirely. It is the rapid, uncontrolled liquidation of an asset's total future value to purchase a single moment of destruction. In this state, the economic actor ceases to be a productive component and becomes a kinetic projectile. It is a transaction where the final cost of the purchase is the purchaser themself. —Naomi Feld, The Liability of Emotion: Human Factors in Economic Collapse The chime at the…-
103.8 K • Ongoing
-
- 1 2 3 Next