Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants. Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on the whole thing: • Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many. • It's too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest. • The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take. • Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: "American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build)." This was evident in the submissions. • AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider. • Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That's unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested. • There's a lot to know that is not written down, and I'm very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.

I visited Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley today. It was designed by, and currently houses, the architecture faculty. The UC Berkeley website notes that "Wurster is often voted Berkeley's ugliest building." I visited because I was curious about whether it would in person seem as unattractive as it does in photos. And, in short: it does. It's gaunt, austere, and filmed in grime. On an elysian campus, it stands out for its bleak hostility. It reminds me of the German submarine base in Bordeaux. The UC Berkeley page agrees that it was never designed to be attractive, quoting the curator of their design archives: “Wurster and his handpicked architects didn’t want anything romantic, or sentimental — they hated the idea of ‘making pretty buildings. They wanted a serious building.” I guess we have to concede success relative to their stated goals, but it does make one wonder what it all says about architecture as a discipline.

New from @arcinstitute: using the latent space representation of genomes from single-cell life to find new candidate functional RNAs. I think this is cool because: (1) it uses deep learning and model interpretability to productive ends on a totally different kind of "knowledge"; (2) it shows how agents may be able to accelerate discovery in vast combinatoric spaces; and (3) it's an example of the synergy we'll hopefully see in the coming years between computational techniques and wet lab biology.

Ben has for many years been the best analyst in tech. I’m very much looking forward to this new @stratechery + @stripe partnership. stratechery.com/2026/present…

These days, I'm struck by how the dominant mood on both sides of the Atlantic toward the other is a kind of pity. Europe frets about the US's supposed slide into autocracy; the US about Europe's pusillanimity and immiseration.

Excellent report on the NSF from Matt Faherty: newscience.org/nsf/. I wish there were more deep investigations and assessments like this of government agencies in the US, the EU, and elsewhere.

I very highly recommend visiting the UK's great cathedrals, e.g. Lincoln and Durham. I did so earlier this year and find myself reminiscing about them quite frequently. Some of the most beautiful buildings in the world.

Today is probably a good time to check in on things with @privy_io, which became part of @stripe just over a year ago. Our acquisition was predicated on three factors: stablecoin growth, self-custody as a key enabler of broader global coverage, and rapidly increasing demand for programmable financial infrastructure. As we said at the time, "money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults." Since then, the Privy team has executed exceptionally well: assets in Privy wallets have grown ~25x, monthly active developers are up ~3x, revenue is up ~9x, and Privy now facilitates nearly $25B of monthly transaction volume. @tryramp, @Deel, @Klarna, @felixpago, @HyperliquidX, and thousands of other businesses are building embedded banking functionality on Privy. At Stripe, we're deeply integrating Privy into Treasury, @Link, and Connect. In each case, it's accelerating our global expansion, and enabling us to build better functionality faster. (Coming soon: @Link balances.) We're also seeing that Privy's wallet infrastructure is the ideal substrate for agents to transact and earn -- live today with @merit_systems, @orthogonal_sh, @Nevermined_ai, @prlnet, and more. Developers prefer programmable financial infrastructure, but agents need it. We expect that the agentic economy will continue to grow extremely quickly. The Privy team has maintained remarkable product velocity, with major launches this year including deposit addresses, earning on Privy balances, digital asset accounts, custodial wallets, and Stripe's own stablecoin cards. It's also been neat to see how Privy has been accelerated by Stripe, with better onramps, @stablecoin payment rails and licenses, Stripe's fiat capabilities and issuing stack, and integration with @Tempo. Together, we're building one API for holding stablecoin balances and earning yield, moving money in and out of fiat, and orchestrating spend with cards. We still have a lot of work to do, not least in integrating everything across Privy, Bridge, and the rest of Stripe -- there's been so much feature and functionality expansion that we haven't yet had much time to reconcile everything. Overall, though, I'm very happy with how things are going, and excited by where these capabilities are headed. If you're interested in working on the future of stablecoins, agentic payments, and crypto's deployment in the real world, you should get in touch with @sternhenri (now leading all of @StripeCrypto) or others on the team.

Stablecoin-backed cards make make global balances instantly usable at 100M+ businesses. We're looking forward to working with @plasma to advance the space.