Technology, Politics, Mind. Since 2014.
Daniel Moran
Writer at Silicon Canals

Daniel Moran

Writer

Daniel Moran is a writer at Silicon Canals covering technology, psychology, and culture. His work specialises in the patterns connecting how people build technology and how they live around it — the incentives that govern engineering decisions also govern lifestyle ones. He contributes across pillars, with the heaviest output in Mind and Technology.

Profile on Brown Brothers Media →

Mind

People in their 60s with no close friends didn’t lose those friendships through any failure of character — the friendships were structurally maintained by a workplace, a school run, a neighborhood, or a marriage, and when the structure ended the friendships ended with it, and what looks like a personal deficit is actually the silent collapse of an architecture nobody told them was holding their social life up

On Saturday morning, Margaret stands at the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee that has gone cold while she was looking at her phone.

News

I grew up in the 1990s and the thing nobody warned me about is that the resilience my generation was praised for was just the absence of anyone asking how we were — and the adults who admire us now for being “low maintenance” don’t realize they’re describing the exact training that made it almost impossible for us to ask for help in our thirties.

By the mid-1990s, somewhere between half and two-thirds of American kids in elementary and middle school were spending part of their afternoons unsupervised, depending on which study you trusted and what exactly you counted as supervision.

News

I’m 38 and I realized last weekend that my dad has started walking me to my car when I leave his house — something he never used to do — and the walk is always five seconds longer than it needs to be, with one extra small comment, one extra small wave, and I understood on the drive home that the walk isn’t a goodbye, it’s a quiet request for one more minute that he doesn’t know how to ask for out loud

I sat in the rental car for ten minutes at the end of my father's road last weekend, engine off, hands on the wheel, unable to make myself drive.

News

The most painful thing about having a lonely aging father is that he won’t let you fix it — he says he’s fine, he doesn’t want to be a burden, he insists the visits are too much trouble — and you spend years respecting his wishes while quietly understanding that the wishes are the loneliness talking, and the man underneath them has been hoping you’d override him for a long time

It is a Sunday evening in London, and my father is sitting in his usual chair, in his usual living room, with the news on at a volume slightly too loud.