Welcome to the Sapiens Project
What we’re about
We are all Homo sapiens, notwithstanding the speck of Neanderthal or even Denisovan in our gene pool. We call ourselves the thinking animal. And among animals, we are unique in how we organize ourselves. We build cities where we live and work more densely and in greater numbers than our ancient ancestors could have ever imagined. We collectively endow social constructs like nation-states, governments and corporations with constantly changing meaning. And as climate change intensifies, geopolitical conflicts take on new forms, and artificial intelligence grows while global populations age and birth rates decline, we’re faced with new realities that challenge everything we’ve built and assumed to be true.
Homo sapiens has adapted to different things over the centuries, and as we’ve changed our environments, our environments have changed us. We don’t look or act much like the hunter-gatherers who wandered across Asia and Africa ten thousand years ago, but we are still more like them than we care to admit. But can we continue to adapt? Or have Homo sapiens run out of steam?
This is the context for the Sapiens Project: how our world is changing, and how we are changing (or not changing) with it. We will offer incisive, inquisitive and (we hope) thought-provoking commentary on today’s human condition, from the biggest issues facing Homo sapiens to less weighty observations on odd, quirky manifestations of the human condition in our culture and our society. We come from different generations and backgrounds, and we share three common starting points which animate our thinking and our writing:
We are curious about (almost) everything. We want to stretch our abilities by learning and thinking about new things, and responding to the constant changes that assail our world.
We challenge the big picture theorists who have simple answers to complex questions, and offer simple explanations for complex social and economic phenomena. We will try to grapple with the intricacies of complex issues, to avoid ideological commitments or preconceptions to the best of our ability, and to do our best to render them comprehensible to our readers.
We approach our world from a humanistic perspective, recognizing what really matters is whether and how eight – soon to be nine – billion Homo sapiens can somehow not only live, but thrive, on this planet. Elon Musk notwithstanding, it’s the only planet we have.
We have set a high bar for ourselves, and we will do what we can to live up to it.
Who we are
Alan Mallach
I am a former public official, college professor, housing consultant, advocate, urbanist, futurist, pianist and author of books on housing, cities and Italian opera which have been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. I am currently a senior fellow with the Center for Community Progress in Washington DC, give a lecture course each fall at Southeast University in Nanjing, and live in a small village in New Jersey surrounded by fields, forests, deer and wild turkeys.
Sarah Sieloff
I am a former federal civil servant and nonprofit leader, and a current consultant, internationally oriented urban planner and frustrated journalist. I publish regularly in national outlets on topics related to cities. I’m also a still-relatively-new mom who's older and crankier than average, and I wonder about the world my toddler will inhabit. I write from the upper left hand corner of the upper left hand corner, i.e. northwest Washington State.
In addition to The Sapiens Project, if you’re curious to read more or see other materials we recommend or find interesting, you can find more materials at our individual Substacks. Just click on our names at the top of this page.
Our commitment
We will publish something each week, and will be sharing Substack notes and trying out podcasting and other communications channels along the way. Please subscribe to stay up to date and make sure you get the latest. We can't always promise wisdom, but we can promise compelling thoughts and ideas to the end of helping all of us live up a little more to the sapiens in our shared name. We will not charge for subscriptions at least through the middle of 2026, and perhaps longer.
Yes, we know your email inbox is too full already, but we promise to make it worth your while.
You can hear this straight from the source:
And if videos aren’t your jam, a transcript is available here. And while it goes without saying, our individual opinions are our own, not those of any institutions with which we may be affiliated.
