Oura just shipped its smallest, most polished ring yet — and quietly layered a new paid add-on on top of the subscription you already owe. The Ring 5 launched in May at $399 (Black/Silver; $499 for other finishes), 40% smaller than the Ring 4, with better sensors and 6–9 days…

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Cambridge New Criticism Marshall McLuhan did not arrive at media theory by accident. It was a long apprenticeship in literature, theology, and close reading. Before he became the man who said the medium is the…

GameChanger started as a way to keep a youth baseball and softball scorebook without a pencil. It is now the default way millions of families watch your favorite 10-year-old’s at-bat from another state, and one of the few consumer apps that can tell you, in public numbers, how large youth…

The useful idea in Moneyball was never that scouts were stupid. It was that the market was paying for the wrong stat. Oakland could not outbid the Yankees for home runs, so Billy Beane paid for on-base percentage — a cheaper way to not make an out. Michael Lewis’s 2003…

Paul Graham’s important essay from 2023 assumes you can choose your field, your hours, and your risks. Most people can’t. Here’s what still works when you don’t have any of that. Paul Graham is a programmer, essayist, and co-founder of Y Combinator, and the essays he’s published since the early…

I grew up with the Chicago Tribune sports section. Box scores before school. Sports Illustrated, This Week in Baseball, the usual stack of player biographies. On television the argument was always the same: the human eye was part of the game, not a defect in it. Instant replay arrived late…

Over thirty years ago, Bo Schembechler jumped the line at an Ann Arbor barbershop. I’ve told this story before: Ann Arbor, sophomore year, a barber named Jerry who cut hair for Michigan’s best for the right price. Bo — freshly retired from coaching, still UM’s athletic director and President of…

A California class action filed last month (August 20, 2026, filed in Northern District California, San Francisco) alleges that Oura’s sleep-stage tracking is closer to a coin flip than clinical science. The complaint, Surber v. Oura, Inc., cites one study that found roughly 53% accuracy across 45 nights. That number…

Every NFL owner has quietly put $8 million into the same fund since 2013. Today that fund is reportedly worth more than $100 million per team. The vehicle is called 32 Equity—the league’s collective venture arm—and it runs a different playbook from the one the NBA uses with Launchpad. NBA…

Alan Watts had a trick that still works better than most of the industry built on top of his foundational work. He would borrow the heavy furniture of Vedanta, Zen, and Taoism—Atman, no-self, the watercourse way—and then refuse to treat any of it as furniture. He talked the way a…