flâneur

Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them

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You can still discover stuff, I promise

Photo cred: my dad I’ve worked with a lot of research assistants over the years, and at some point we inevitably have The Talk: should they get a PhD? I was recently having The Talk with one particularly distraught student, who was worried her ideas aren’t good enough. “Maybe I’m not cut out for it,” she told me, “or maybe all of the easy ideas have already been done.” Like her, I’ve worried that I was born too late and all the low-hanging fruit was picked before I got here. Fifty years ago, you could get a million citations just for showing that people like their own team the best, that…

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