About Compound Interests
Welcome to Compound Interests! This website started off as a personal project — I’d written for many different newspapers and blogs over the years, and just wanted to collect all of my writing in one place that I owned, safe from being deleted when a website shut down or changed ownership. While creating this personal archive, I remembered how much I loved to research and write, and decided that this would be a great space for me to publish new work too.
Compound Interests is my blog dedicated to the exploration of humanity, especially how we interact with each other and the world around us — from politics and culture to business and technology. While “compound interest” is a term in finance, I often experience a similar phenomenon when learning about a new topic: a single fact or anecdote sparks my curiosity, I research it and learn new things that intersect with my other interests, leading to even more curiosity and research. I hope to use Compound Interests to share what I learn with others, mainly in the form of blog posts but maybe some other types of content too.
The title is also inspired by an apocryphal story where Albert Einstein called compound interest “the most powerful force in the universe.” While often taken as a comment on the importance of having a savings account or the pain of being in debt, I think it applies even more to the importance of encouraging curiosity. With billions of people now sharing our planet, there is an endless supply of fascinating things to learn about, and countless connections and discoveries that have not yet been made.
Because of my career in drug policy, “compound interest” has yet a third meaning, as I’m very interested in the study of chemical compounds and how they affect people. Due to my professional work, hobbies, and side projects, Compound Interests will pay particular attention to certain topics like cannabis, civil liberties, robotics, space exploration, board games, co-operative businesses, non-profits, Democratic politics, and New England. I’ll also attempt to connect these areas whenever possible, since the most interesting things in life tend to be found where seemingly unrelated topics intersect.
Please let me know if there is anything you’d like me to cover — I’d love to use this as the starting point of creating a real community of curious people, and welcome any suggestions or recommendations for interesting things to look into. If we let all of our interests compound, who knows what sort of cool things we’ll learn.
Thanks for reading!
- Sam Tracy
