The blue-white glare of the TIG welder cuts through the early morning fog on the 43rd floor, a needle of artificial sun puncturing the gray New York skyline. I’m standing just far enough back to avoid the retinal burn, watching Miller work. He’s been doing this for 23 years. He moves with a fluidity that suggests the torch is an extension of his own nervous system, a bionic limb that breathes fire at 3303 degrees. He doesn’t look like a man who could accidentally level a city block. He looks like a god of metallurgy. And that, as Sam J.-C. would tell you while nursing a lukewarm coffee, is exactly where the catastrophe begins. Sam is a dark pattern researcher who spends his life looking at how systems trick people into making terrible choices, and he’s obsessed with what he calls ‘The Competence Trap.’ It’s the terrifying reality that the better you are at your job, the more likely you are to believe that the laws of physics will make an exception for you just this once.

The Plumbing Arrogance

Last night, I found myself in the middle of my own tiny catastrophe. It was 3:03 am, and the upstairs toilet was making a sound like a dying whale. Instead of doing