Empathy - Circudyne

Mid-century travel poster: an orange book on a weathered railing at the desert's edge, a lone Las Vegas casino resort glowing across the forecourt at sunset.

Summer Reading 2026

Made to Stick

Circularity is a complicated idea that needs to be simplified to be remembered. The Heath brothers wrote the book on that, and it points to a story we should have been telling all along.

Mid-century travel poster: a navy book and a wooden birdhouse on a workshop bench, seen through the open garage door onto a late-summer meadow at sunset.

Summer Reading 2026

Build

Circularity transformation needs a cornucopia of new-to-world products, made quickly and well. Tony Fadell's method for making them is repeatable.

On the Bubble

Closing out a season that asked why circularity stalled — and discovered that the environmental case, while critical, is not enough to close the deal. The benefits hiding behind it are the ones that will.

Winslow Homer's Breezing Up: a man and three boys sailing a catboat in fair wind, leaning confidently into the sea, with a schooner visible on the horizon

On the Bubble

Why Self-Disrupt?

The environmental imperative is the reason to begin. This is about why you'll be glad you did it. Have to versus get to. Part I of a two-part conclusion.

Mary Cassatt's "Young Mother Sewing" (1900): a child leans into her mother's lap with total trust while the mother calmly continues her work, absorbing the contact without interruption.

Reassurance

Reassurance is a Strategic Capacity

The performance economy, at its best, creates the conditions for play. At its worst, it creates the conditions for vigilance.

Tiny figures lost in Piranesi's impossible prison of arches and stairs—architecture so vast and self-referential that individual optimization becomes meaningless.

On the Bubble

Transformative Ends, Incremental Means?

The era of incremental change is rapidly coming to a close

Vincent van Gogh’s The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix), showing a compassionate figure helping a wounded man onto a horse, rendered in expressive brushwork.

On the Bubble

Empathy Is a Strategic Capacity

It enables worldbuilding where time and value are not yet fixed, providing a path to product–market fit before markets, metrics, or demand signals exist.

A painterly parody of Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” reimagined with stylized, hand-painted symbols of decay replacing the river’s ice floes as the boat moves forward.

On the Bubble

Leadership in the Time of Enshittification

Why do rigidly managed systems so often end in decay? A closer look at enshittification, linear logic, and why this moment calls for leadership.