Sociology & Urban Planning

Dunbar's Number: The Limit Is Attention, Not Memory

You can recognise thousands of faces and actively maintain far fewer relationships. The famous figure of 150 is contested — the underlying constraint is not.

The Medium Is the Message: The Form Does More Than the Content

Writing's real consequence was not that people could record things — it was that law could outlive its author. Every medium does work that no individual message controls.

The Overton Window: The Difference Between Wrong and Unsayable

Ideas that are ordinary today were once outside the range of what a respectable person said aloud. Mostly the facts didn't change — the boundary of the sayable did, and it moves by repetition.

Emergence: The Traffic Jam That Nobody Caused

You drive through a ten-minute jam and past no accident. The jam was real, it moved backwards down the road, and no car was it. A great deal of the world is built this way.

The 15-Minute City Is an Old Idea Wearing a New Name

Most of human urban history was built around a 15-minute radius. The last century of car-centric planning was the actual anomaly.