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The six-pager democratizes invention within Amazon. Anyone inside the company can write one, and if they build enough traction, senior leadership will review it. “I read six-pagers that come from other parts of the company that don’t report to me,” Wilke told me. “I read six-pagers that are from pe…

There are two types of work: idea work and execution work.

Idea work is everything that goes into creating something new: dreaming up new things, figuring out how you’re going to make them, and going out and creating.

Execution work is everything that goes into supporting those things once th…

So Mleville slapped at God. He could not help playing the infidel: he is one of hte most delvingly sacrilegious writers who has ever existed. For him, metaphysics could not stop like a day-trip at some calm watering-place. Dialectic was always an elastic solitude stretching into the desert. [...]

Or perhaps this is just my fear projected onto him. When I was a teenager, I used to think that Philip Larkin’s line about how life is first boredom, then fear, was right about boredom (those Sundays) and wrong about fear. What’s so fearful about life? Now, at forty-seven, I think it should be th…

[...] When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth…