Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
as we age, our comfort with creative expression declines. We’re discouraged by the learning curve of creative skills and tools, by our tendency to compare ourselves to others, and by the harsh opinions of critics. As Picasso famously quipped, “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.”
Becoming or creating something new isn’t always a cake walk filled with rainbows, unicorns and lollipops—the path is often littered with darkness, solitude, and inner demons. But waiting for us beyond that shadowy road are new lessons, skills, creations, identities, and capacities, such as empathy and compassion.
The English poet Willam Blake described these thresholds as “doors between the known and unknown.” My daughter's birth is like a towering gate looming over me, quickly approaching and ready to swallow me. As I pass through, a part of me will die and another will emerge on the other side. With both feet firmly planted on the ground facing this certainty, my body is flooded with emotions—anxiety, fear, sadness, grief, excitement—because I treasure the road I’ve traveled, appreciate who I’ve become, and wonder how things will unfold.
When a client or friend says they’re lost, I don’t tell them where to go, how to proceed or who they should talk to. That wouldn’t serve them! In fact, I challenge them—you're not literally, physically lost, but you’re feeling a sense of lostness and we have to decipher what that means for you. I want them to understand themselves, their experiences, and where they’re coming from. Only from that place can they make sense of their lostness, create new maps, and see the path forward.
Wirecutter, Eater, and more should all be accessible this way so that when I have a product I want to buy, or I’m in need of a restaurant to visit I don’t have to scroll through a list of articles with lots of options. Instead, I can just ask, “What’s a good place to eat in Fort Greene tonight?” and get a response that’s based on the latest Eater reviews in my neighborhood.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
Parents can help children get the most out of play and use it to strengthen the parent-child bond. But you don’t want to help too much. “Guiding play can be fine, but one needs to be careful to give enough room for the unknown to take shape,” Alcée says. Here’s what that means on a practical level.
what matters is who you are, not when you do it. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. And if you're not, a good economy won't save you. Someone who thinks "I better not start a startup now, because the economy is so bad" is making the same mistake as the people who thought during the Bubble "all I have to do is start a startup, and I'll be rich."
Screenwork has been hit by a Weimar scale inflation
Smart Questions are, typically, kind of dumb. And, just as typical, questions that might initially seem dumb or underinformed, or downright unintelligent, are the smartest way to learn stuff if you’re a journalist, an academic, or anybody else.
The biggest obstacle to our capacity to love each other is that we fear the asymmetry of giving and not receiving. But the heart is a muscle: you can make it bigger by training it, and the bigger it gets the less it cares for symmetry or saving face. Instead of repetitions of lifting weights, you train your heart with repetitions of *directing compassion at things*, like that friend who's less available to see you than they used to be, or the crush who ghosted you after several nice dates.
As an important aside, if you try to learn on your own, it can be really hard. You’ll hit some weird ruby error and give up. It’s important to have someone—a friend, a teacher at a coding bootcamp, etc.—that get you through these frustrating blocks.
David Whyte nailed this in *Constellations*, writing, “Ambition left to itself, like a Rupert Murdoch, always becomes tedious, its only object, the creation of later and larger empires of control.”
Over the course of the potty training weekend, my husband and I repeated the goal to my son what felt like hundreds of times — and it wasn’t just “poop and pee in the potty” — he’d known he was supposed to do that for months now and that hadn’t motivated him. The goal now was to keep his underwear clean and dry. We reminded him constantly that to do that, he’d have to tell us when we had to go. Trust your child to do that even if you think they won’t — kids this age don’t like to be forced to do *anything*.
For years, science and conventional wisdom have stated unequivocally that looking at a device — like a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or television — before bed is akin to lighting years of your natural life on fire, then letting the flames consume your children, your community, and the very concept of human progress. Simply Google “screens before bed” and you’ll find thousands of articles, many from higher-education institutions and furious British people (they seem the most worked up about this issue as a nation). The message is clear: The blue light emitting from your devices is destroying your natural melatonin reserves, altering your circadian rhythms, and making you ugly. Watching TV or TikTok before bed is giving you headaches and making you confused, leading to depression, diabetes, cancer, and early death. If your offspring opt for the same crutch, they will never achieve greatness.
I'm of the camp that unpursued ideas are worth zero dollars. (Maybe less than zero, since they are occuyping brain space.)
We learned during our first year that to our surprise, 80% of our users were business travelers. This led to our first pivot, where we started to focus on business travelers exclusively.
We are all in control of how we experience time. We can let time happen to us OR we can make time work for us.
Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go *off-script* early, usually in more than one way.
Like a finger trap, these desires for remedy plunge the user only further into the technological murk and its associated despair.
• I’m not here to say you should quit Twitter, or that no enjoyment remains in cavorting through the network. I’m only here to say, Twitter has no future, so please, enjoy it only and exactly for what it is — every decline is surfable — and do not disregard the alternatives to its timeline, when and if they appear.
You don't need to have an opinion on everything. It's perfectly reasonable to have no opinion on something that you haven't researched or don't understand.
Doing right by our users and our shareholders (including you) means embracing reality as it is.
The minute you start walking down a path toward a yak shaving party, it’s worth making a compromise. Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.
By letting go, you’ve cleared up space for new quests. No more dozens of tabs open forever; you saved them, then let them go back into the ether. No perpetual thinking on an idea; you wrote it down, let your second brain remember for you.
you are procrastinating or being akratic or falling into perfectionism (closely related to procrastination), by deliberately overcomplicating something or trying to use fancy or shiny new techniques, which of course frequently lead to new subgoals because you aren’t familiar with them yet.
I think it’s a lot easier to actually pay attention and concentrate with someone when you’re working with something that’s as analog as a notebook. Being on an iPad or a laptop when you’re in-person – as much as I’d like to – can create a barrier between two people.
Writing is not the outcome of thinking, it's the place where thinking takes place. Only once your thoughts are out of your head can you begin to make sense of them.
Fifteen years from now sometimes seems like a million years from now but then I remember how quickly the previously fifteen years of life have flashed by and suddenly I’m terrified. It’s an absolutely wild variety of terror, this “oh goodness I only get so much time with these human beings while they’re young and what if I mess it all up” feeling.
Electronic keyboards came and went, but using them—lifeless, rickety, bereft of voice or vibration—was like cooking with earplugs in your nose.
The problem is that when it comes to sleep, unlike almost every other area of life, effort is not rewarded. In fact, it is actively punished. The more you try, the less you are likely to succeed.
Adoption is referred to as a primal wound by Nancy Verrier, a therapist specializing in adoption and separation research. She says that there is an indelible impact when the connection between a child and its biological mother is severed. The experience can manifest as a devastating loss, with impacts felt years into the future.
What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.
And while I do what I can to strive for good health and longevity, to stave off weakening muscles and receding bone, I have a mantra I insert into those reckless thoughts that try to derail me: I accept. I accept the marks and the loosening skin, the wrinkles. I accept my body and let go of the need to be perfect, look perfect, defy gravity, defy logic, defy humanity. I accept my humanity.
In Navajo culture, rug weavers would leave little imperfections along the borders in the shape of a line called *ch'ihónít'i*, which is translated into English as "spirit line" or "spirit pathway. The Navajos believe that when weaving a rug, the weaver entwines part of her being into the cloth. The spirit line allows this trapped part of the weaver's spirit to safely exit the rug.
Your attention is worth trillions of dollars for a reason: it might just be the most precious thing we own.
Part of the driving force behind many of these menus is chefs of color pushing back against the expectation that they must only cook the food of their families.
Y Combinator has more weapons than any other player in venture capital. No one else has such pronounced network effects, pricing power, and brand equity wrapped up in a single package.
I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.
You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
Some parents argue that skipping screen time altogether is almost easier than budgeting it. It’s hard to say no to screens completely, but when a child gets used to the kind of rush that comes from using digital devices, they will learn to seek out the immediate gratification of a screen over the slow but more meaningful feedback of the real world.
It’s the flavor of ritual. It’s the taste of inclusion.
Drugs: do you do them? What do you think of them? – *Tom C. (Nottingham, UK)*
We all could use a healthier does of humility when we are too flush with great man hubris. The world is richer and more complicated than we give it credit for.
Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it's not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.
By one estimate, 5 billion tons of carbon flow from plants to mycorrhizal fungi annually. Without help from the fungi, that carbon would likely stay in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the powerful greenhouse gas that is heating the planet and fueling dangerous weather. “Keeping this fungal network protected is paramount as we face climate change,” Dr. Kiers said.
There are now so few fires that there is double the number of false alarms each year in the US than genuine fires. The number of firefighters, however, has skyrocketed – primarily to meet medical demand.
You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.
New research shows that we judge future positive events as both farther away and shorter than negative or neutral ones, leading us to feel like a holiday is over as soon as it begins.
Each of us constructs our model of reality via the experiences, relationships and knowledge we encounter in our random walks through the world. Early in life, you’re eager to add on — to collect concepts and ideas and perspectives. It’s empowering to add tools to your tool chest, even if indiscriminately. After a while, though, it becomes more difficult to make changes and additions. You grow accustomed to the stuff you have and sensitive to your internal design. If your house is in a particular style, some additions just don’t fit. You don’t want to put that modern sofa in your old Victorian.