There are days when I feel our species is a kind of orchestra that forgot the score but still plays with great confidence. Violins screaming in different keys, trumpets improvising in panic, the conductor having a small existential crisis. And yet, we insist with straight faces that this is rational decision-making. Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein gave a polite scientific name to this chaos: noise. Personally, I think they were … Read the rest
Europe is very easy to insult.
From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar … Read the rest
Tired after more than twelve hours working day I was driving home through Andrássy Street recently and got slowed down by the taxi drivers’ protest. Blue lights, horns, yellow cars squeezed together like irritated bees. In that moment, when the city suddenly becomes a bottleneck of human frustration, you cannot help wondering how many strange incentives are packed into one square kilometer of Budapest traffic.
At first glance they looked … Read the rest
It is a strange thing, how the brain calculates danger.
You would think a kilogram of fear is the same everywhere, like a kilogram of sugar. But it is not. Fear is priced locally. In one city you hear a car backfire and three people dive under the table, in another you hear automatic gunfire and people only speed up their steps because they are late for work. The bullets … Read the rest
I have a simple, possibly impolite thesis: the “nation” is a beautiful story we tell to coordinate strangers, and loud nationalism is what people reach for when the story stops paying their bills. Nations are not ancient tribes waking from deep time; they are recent inventions—clever ones—that industrial print, schools, and armies stitched together so we would feel kinship with people we will never meet. That is not an insult; … Read the rest
