Open Tabs
The Grammar of Fantasy and the Fantastic Binomial: Beloved Italian Children’s Book Author Gianni Rodari on Creativity and the Key to Great Storytelling
If a society based on the myth of productivity (and on the reality of profit) needs only half-formed human beings — loyal executors, diligent imitators, and docile instruments without a will of their own — that means there is something wrong with this society and it needs to be changed posthaste. To change it, creative human beings are needed, people who know how to make full use of the imagination.
(Vía Austin Kleon)
James Tate, "Dream On"
Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.
(Vía Austin Kleon)
Langston Hughes, "Dreams"
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
(Vía Austin Kleon)
“I should’ve started earlier” - Make Human by Maria Bowler
Part of a month-long series of daily meditations “to serve as spiritual fuel for you, a culture maker”. However, I think these are applicable to life in general, even if we don’t consider ourselves “culture makers”.
One of the interesting bits:
Nothing will snuff out the imagination faster than sneering at yourself for what you haven’t done in the past. The way you treat the actions and performance of your past self not only inhibits the actions of your present self, but unless it’s changed, it will be the exact same way that your future self treats what you do today.
Epictetus (via "3-2-1: A simple practice for peace, how to become disciplined, and being bold")
Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.
3-2-1: A simple practice for peace, how to become disciplined, and being bold
Intelligence isn’t just about what you know. It is also the ability to avoid being your own bottleneck.
- If you lack the skills, be willing to look foolish while you learn them.
- If you lack the connections, be courageous enough to reach out and build them.
- If you feel uncertain, be bold enough to figure it out along the way.
Many people have the ability, but they talk themselves out of trying.
#56: "How to Write a Novel with the Kitchen Sink Thrown In" by Amber Sparks, author of HAPPY PEOPLE DON'T LIVE HERE
Some advice from author Amber Sparks on how to use all the interesting bits of information one comes across / collects. It is targeted at fiction authors, but maybe, as Austin Kleon puts it, it can be useful for non-fiction authors or, dare I say, everyone else.
To wit:
- Buy a LOT of notebooks and start separating your interesting things by topic
- Get a bulletin board or really big piece of paper or reserve a wall in your house or office or apartment and then use it to connect your ideas with red string like in the detective shows (or the meme of the crazy conspiracy guy 😆)
- Think about the characters you have, and how you can feed them the information you’re gathering
- Jump around in time: time travelers, storylines happening in different times, flashbacks, etc.
- Remember the iceberg: not everything needs to be in the book
- Pare back: if it doesn’t fit, then it doesn’t fit
Building personal apps with open source and AI
Again on the topic on personal apps, this time from the folks at GitHub and focusing also on how open-source code and generative AI can ease the process and be a multiplier (opposed to a replacement).
An app can be a home-cooked meal
Robin Sloan on the charm of making niche apps for very small groups of people, and how it is analogous to home cooking.
Fuzzy computing
Matt Holden on how generative AI can be though of as a tool for “fuzzy” computing, i.e. a tool with more permissible inputs, which in time makes personal computing more accessible (and/or accessible to more people)
How To Finish
Grant Snider on how to see creative projects to their completion, which might be as important as getting them started.
Related (possibly😅):
- Quantity leads to quality (the origin of a parable), on Austin Kleon’s blog, about how finishing more things can lead to a better quality on said things
- oblique strategies for starting a new project , on personal canon, which despite the title covers both starting and finishing as skills
- The Imperfectionist: Seventy per cent: “If you’re 70% sure a decision is the right one, implement it.”
Tips To Break Your Online Addiction: Garden
This is an oldie (2011), but as relevant as ever. Randy Murray advises taking gardening as a hobby to counterbalance the hours spent online, and the intervening years have only furthered his point of having offline hobbies as an antidote to the ills of the online world.
One thing after another - Austin Kleon
It is better to do your own duty / badly than to perfectly do / another’s….
How to turn down an invitation - Letters of Note
Dear Mr. Adams:
Thanks for your letter inviting me to join the Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower.
I must decline, for secret reasons.
I’m using this from now on 😄
The Dark Side of a Second Brain
Taking notes so I can avoid these pitfalls ;)
Summing up:
- Digital hoarding - pure accumulation without revision
- Weakened memory - cognitive offloading results in weaker recall
- System maintenance trap - spending more time maintaining the system than using it
- Decision fatigue - hyper-organization and excessive complexity causes you to abandon the system
- False productivity - note-taking feels productive but doesn’t lead to learning
To avoid these pitfalls: keep your system simple, and give it a use, don’t just convert it into a dumping ground. If possible, link your notes. Simple systems can lead to serendipitous connections that a more complex organization will not allow.
15 years of blogging (and 3 reasons I keep going)
The title says it all, but I find the second reason in the list particularly interesting:
Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It’s thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you manipulate. Blogging has taught me to embrace this kind of not-knowing in my other art and my writing.
Typewriter interview with Sally Mann
My young friends are more than spies—they are my Virgilian guides through these purgatorial times. They offer me hope for the future; so smart and canny and kind—when I am with young people, I feel an uncharacteristic surge of optimism.
How To Read More
More advice on how to read more… which I maybe should start applying 😅.
Some points that stood out for me:
-
putting away your devices is step 1 😅
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remember reading for pleasure:
Remember: pleasure fun hobby fun pleasure. Strip all that shit in your head away—your high school English teacher, the social media stuff about tracking how many books you read in a year, the folks who tell you it is political or resistance or moral or healthy like vegetables or a hack for getting ahead. It’s not competition. There is no test. It’s something you want to do. Full stop.
(Vía Austin Kleon)
the pleasures of reading – The Homebound Symphony
Useful advice for (re-)starting a reading habit. Via Austin Kleon.
Alive Internet Theory
Campbell Walker (a.k.a Struthless) offers a plan (and lots of inspiration) to make the theory in the title a reality (in opposition to the Dead Internet theory).
It’s really good seeing people out there fighting the good fight against the doom and gloom and the enshittification of the internet.
And yes, the phrase at the end is true: hope is punk.
Don't Follow Your Dreams, Follow Your Tools
Hank Green on what is, in his opinion, the secret to his success.
We have been sold the “follow your dreams ✨✨” advice a lot, and yet, as he puts it, if you blindly follow your dreams, you might miss on greater / more interesting opportunities. And this resonates a lot with me because I think I have been unknowingly following his advice: the last years have been a mix of having a set of loose goals and making use of the opportunities that landed on my lap, or whatever tools / options I had available at the moment.
64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney - by Ian Leslie
A very heartfelt homage to the last surviving Beatle, of interest to any Beatles fan. It is quite an oldie (from 2020), and in the intervening years the author has written a book, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.
(Found via Austin Kleon)
All the Ghosts You Will Be
Clicked on this video enticed by the title, and now I find myself with the very difficult task of summarizing it 😅.
Here’s my attempt: this is a video about how you might live forever, how humanity might live forever, and what drives humanity forward. Deeply philosophical, even existential.
The Substack AI Report - by Arielle Swedback - On Substack
Interesting insights from the publishing platform on the use of AI. If this is to be believed, then most of the creators that use AI leverage it as an aid / assistant for things such as brainstorming, research and writing assistance, instead of using it for plain generation.
Concerns are present even among the creators using AI, mostly on the ethical side as well as in the effects that AI use might have on their own creative voices / practice.
Contra el algoritmo: cultivar jardines digitales en vez de likes
Glad to see a video in Spanish on the topic of digital gardens… It even references the essay from Mike Caulfied, The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, as well as the work of Maggie Appleton
Q&A: Conan’s Advice On Taking Risks Before You’re Ready | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend
My lesson to everybody is: when your moment comes, you may not be ready, but you have to take it and then figure it out on the way.
PART 2: The INCREDIBLE Direction Billie Eilish and Finneas Gave Their Mixers - with Jon Castelli
If there’s anything I can say I hope I don’t lose in life, is the option to experience something for the first time, as if you were a child, and I feel like music is one of the ways that we can have that feeling
Also recommended if watching a couple guys nerding about music seems up your alley 😄
Hirayasumi: My Quarter-life Crisis Can't Be This Comfy
I’m a little older than the target audience mentioned in the video 😅, but I like the take on how to handle the challenges of transitioning to adulthood — which can be applied to life in general, I think:
Life is fast. Take it slow.
Françoise Sagan on the power of laziness - by Mason Currey
Not only do I like the take on laziness and work ethic by the French author of Bonjour Tristesse, this is also how I get most of my side projects done 😉:
The pleasure I derive from my work overcomes the laziness and I work for a while.
The First Known Story Ever Written | analysing the Epic of Gilgamesh
Came because I was curious about the story, stayed for the deep analysis of the origins of human civilization.
The highlights:
- The first civilization to ever put things into writing, writing about the invention of writing itself 🤯:
Until then, there had been no putting words in clay. Now, under that sun and on that day, it was indeed so. (Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta)
- at the 52:35 mark: “Though men are mortal, mankind itself is immortal”
- The distinction between the three states of being — animal, man, god — and how man is uniquely positioned because it has an awareness that the animal lacks, but also a fear of death that no god can understand and that leads it to live life to its fullest. This calls to mind how in Buddhism, there are also different realms of existence — one of them also corresponding to animals, other to humans, and other to devas (gods) — but only humans are uniquely positioned to escape the eternal cycle of death and rebirth [citation needed]
How Good Writers Work - by Michael Agger
Advice for writers, but might be useful for other jobs / endeavors / areas of life (emphasis in “might”).
On the Nature of Reality, Consciousness and (Artificial) Intelligence | Ashish Dahal
a reflection as old as time ;)
The highlights:
- I like how the author compares some of the ideas on the topic with concepts about machine learning (which I think is a topic very familiar to him). Not only is that a very good way of making unfamiliar concepts easier to understand, but it might also uncover connections previously unseen.
- “… the question ‘when will AI become conscious?’ is the wrong question. The right question is ‘what kinds of consciousness do current AI systems have, and how might those forms of consciousness evolve as the systems become more sophisticated?’”
- The idea of human consciousness as being augmented by (time-persistent) memory. I think the same idea applies to some other complex systems: without memory that persists across time, even a complex digital system is no better than a simple mechanical machine [reference needed]
3-2-1: On enthusiasm, playing to your strengths, and living one day at a time - James Clear
III.
“Education teaches you to analyze. Entrepreneurship teaches you to create.
The educated mindset is great at dissecting and criticizing. What did Shakespeare mean here? What were the major forces of this historical period? What is the limiting reagent in this chemical reaction?
The entrepreneurial mindset is great at building and improving. Design a better product. Craft a new marketing plan. Stop talking about what’s wrong and make something better.
The trick is to keep learning, but to never lose your ability to build.”
Some notes on failure
Hello Maker,
Your sweet words about (and pictures of) Making Timeare so darn beautiful. Thank you for sharing them with me; I wrote the book for you, so I’m so happy it can be in your hands now.
I have two events coming up that I’d love to see you at. They’re free, just RSVP!
**Minneapolis, MN: **Feb. 11 at 7pm. Open Book
**New York, NY: **Feb. 19 at 7pm. 91 Leonard St.
I promise to only send you things that nourish your attention.
Now, for some notes on failure
I think I discovered something about failure that I didn’t know before.
I’ll tell you about it, but first I’ll fail to tell you about it.
I hear agreement all over the political spectrum that our systems are failing.
We all act like we know what failure is, even as we’re looking at different problems.
In the thirteen years I have lived in the U.S., I have never heard anyone say they think the American educational system is successful.
But people have gotten mad at me online when I’ve suggested it could actually be better in concrete ways, and that’s quite something. Like I’m being viciously naive.
Hope invites this aggression. Let’s call it Hope Aggression.
Failure might just be something that happens, but the pain of failure might be the shame of having hoped for another thing to happen.
This shame is cruel to our tenderest, most open heart. It sees a desire — a connection to possibility — and tries to squish it with its big toe.
So failure is not its own feeling: failure’s suffering arrives when hope meets shaming.
Hope is Oliver Twist wanting more, and shame is the horrified master:
When we fail, we are often the one who hoped, and we internalize the cruel master — to self, to other, to the world.
“How stupid of me to have hoped.”
“How dare they let me hope.”
Someone asked me on a podcast how I got to be where I am. First, I wondered where I am. Then I answered, “Failing a lot!”
Many dreams made me run, run, run toward them until they led me face-first into yellow brick walls.
Like this dream: Working at a magazine in New York City (read that with the reverence of a girl from Winnipeg)!
The reality: Living with two ornery roommates in a tiny apartment in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, taking four separate trains to work twice each day, all for the pleasure of accruing debt to keep going.
Not all failure is a single rejection. Sometimes it’s an accumulation of small resistances — an erosion of ease, a steady, impersonal no that seems to be coming from Life itself.
When faced with a pile of resistance, I want to ask, “Why is life rejecting me? What is wrong with me? What is wrong with this whole thing?”
This all suggests that longing is lack, that wanting is a wound that needs to heal as soon as possible.
Every dead end dismantled some illusion I didn’t know I was still serving. This brought me closer to reality (read: life itself), which is what I wanted in the first place.
Life does not reject us, but the shaming of our hope might make us want to reject the life within us.
That, more than failure, is the real loss.
Do you think a friend would enjoy this?
Thanks for being willing to work with possibility, folks. I appreciate you deeply.
Love,
Maria
Do not stop now. Do not ask why.
Hello Maker,
I can’t stop thinking how tender, precious, and fragile this life is — all of which make awe possible. It makes me want to write something like a non-sectarian sermon (which I kind of did, see below).
You’re reading this? Cool. Let’s make sure you get the next one.
But first, I guess a lot of people feel tender about birthdays, and today is my book’s birthday: MAKING TIME can now be in your hot little hands. How strange! Let me get my mind around it.
Let’s quantify this thing.
A book in numbers:
- 2 years and 7 months in the official process.
- 6 rounds of editing.
- 604 cups of coffee.
- 2 trips to an Airbnb in Wisconsin to wander in the woods and stare at the wall and sometimes type.
- 713 walks taken in my neighborhood.
- 56 “what do I doooooo” conversations and just as many tears.
this could be you
My ego, my producer-self, wants to count to get control. I want to manage what happens to me, the world, strangers, the climate, my image, my friends, my kid (et al.) so badly!
Yet today all I can think in the face of all of this — the abundance of grace and pain, the sheer excess pouring out of everything, I want to fall to my knees and touch the earth. Who am I to withhold my presence, hoard my ideas, and protect my ego?
Here is that sermon-shaped thing:
A homily for why
“You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.”
― Simone Weil, **Gravity and Grace**
Do not stop now. Do not ask why.
Create to find your center.
Create to meet the world with your highest intelligence.
Create because it is an act of generosity.
Create because your process reveals how to be part of the larger, collective process.
Create because your process and the world’s are inseparable.
Create to offer the world a reflection of its living contradictions.
Create because consuming will dull you.
Create because consuming the status quo’s imagination will shape you in its image.
Create because a blank page or a lump of clay reminds you: beginnings are possible.
Create to find the fertile silence within.
Create because that silence will teach you how to bear it.
Create because your community deserves to see beauty made real, now and always.
Create because you are a bell no one else can ring.
Create because shaping something outside yourself clarifies what’s within.
Create because sharing your consciousness — however you do it —bridges isolation and connection.
Create because making is a conversation with existence itself.
Create because to make something is to tell the universe: “I am listening. I am answering.”
Share this with your people
3 Easy Ways to Help Making Time Find Its People
Here’s how you can help it ripple outward into the world:
- Ask your library to carry it. Libraries are so good. They will be happy to hear your request! They often have forms on their website for requests like this.
- Goodread It. If you’re on Goodreads, mark it as “want to read.” And when you’ve read it, a short review (just one insight or thought that stuck with you) can go further than you think.
- Pass it on. If something in the book moves you, share it with a friend or post about it. We all trust the books our people swear by, and your voice can make that connection happen.
- Leave a comment on Amazon. A single sentence about what resonated with you is a big deal.
Thanks for helping this little book find its way; it means more than you know.
Love,
Maria
All is not well! (But some things are)
“My best teachers were not the ones who had all the answers. They were the ones deeply excited by questions they couldn’t answer.”
— Brian Greene, physicist
Novelist Marilynne Robinson on how to handle good luck
“I can only make sense of my unaccountable good fortune by assuming that it means I am under special obligation to make good use of it.”
Source: **The Paris Review Interviews: Volume IV
3-2-1: On the joy of losing, how to set expectations with others, and notes to myself
- “Remain playful as your responsibilities increase. It’s easy to become serious when people and results depend on you, but nearly everyone’s performance improves when they proceed lightly through the world.”
- “Although losing is never fun, there is a certain satisfaction that can be found on the other side of losing — but only when you give your all. To lose with half effort offers no pleasure in the moment and no peace in the long run. But if your ambitions were full and your attempt was genuine, after the sting of losing wears off you’ll be left with something resembling contentment. The reward is not always in winning, but in striving.”
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I found this in a pile of notes to myself, and share here simply as food for thought… “You want two things:
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Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. No wasted movement. No wasted effort.
- Compounding. Every project should have a long runway and feed the others.”
Things That Aren't Doing the Thing
Preparing to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Scheduling time to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Making a to-do list for the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Telling people you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Writing a banger tweet about how you’re going to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn’t doing the thing. Hating on other people who have done the thing isn’t doing the thing. Hating on the obstacles in the way of doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Fantasizing about all of the adoration you’ll receive once you do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Reading about how to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading this essay isn’t doing the thing.
The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.
Digital hygiene
Every now and then I get reminded about the vast fraud apparatus of the internet, re-invigorating my pursuit of basic digital hygiene around privacy/security of day to day computing. The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.
Screenshot 2025-03-18 at 10
Password manager. Your passwords are your “first factor”, i.e. “something you know”. Do not be a noob and mint new, unique, hard passwords for every website or service that you sign up with. Combine this with a browser extension to create and Autofill them super fast. For example, I use and like 1Password. This prevents your passwords from 1) being easy to guess or crack, and 2) leaking one single time, and opening doors to many other services. In return, we now have a central location for all your 1st factors (passwords), so we must make sure to secure it thoroughly, which brings us to…
Hardware security key. The most critical services in your life (e.g. Google, or 1Password) must be additionally secured with a “2nd factor”, i.e. “something you have”. An attacker would have to be in possession of both factors to gain access to these services. The most common 2nd factor implemented by many services is a phone number, the idea being that you get a text message with a pin code to enter in addition to your password. Clearly, this is much better than having no 2nd factor at all, but the use of a phone number is known to be extremely insecure due to the SIM swap attack. Basically, it turns out to be surprisingly easy for an attacker to call your phone company, pretend they are you, and get them to switch your phone number over to a new phone that they control. I know this sounds totally crazy but it is true, and I have many friends who are victims of this attack. Therefore, purchase and set up hardware security keys - the industrial strength protection standard. In particular, I like and use YubiKey. These devices generate and store a private key on the device secure element itself, so the private key is never materialized on a suspiciously general purpose computing device like your laptop. Once you set these up, an attacker will not only need to know your password, but have physical possession of your security key to log in to a service. Your risk of getting pwned has just decreased by about 1000X. Purchase and set up 2-3 keys and store them in different physical locations to prevent lockout should you physically lose one of the keys. The security keys support a few authentication methods. Look for “U2F” in the 2nd factor settings of your service as the strongest protection. E.g. Google and 1Password support it. Fallback on “TOTP” if you have to, and note that your YubiKeys can store TOTP private keys, so you can use the YubiKey Authenticator app to access them easily through NFC by touching your key to the phone to get your pin when logging in. This is significantly better than storing TOTP private keys on other (software) authenticator apps, because again you should not trust general purpose computing devices. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into full detail, but basically I strongly recommend the use of 2-3 YubiKeys to dramatically strengthen your digital security.
Biometrics. Biometrics are the third common authentication factor (“something you are”). E.g. if you’re on iOS I recommend setting up FaceID basically everywhere, e.g. to access the 1Password app and such.
Security questions. Dinosaur businesses are obsessed with the idea of security questions like “what is your mother’s maidan name?”, and force you to set them up from time to time. Clearly, these are in the category of “something you know” so they are basically passwords, but conveniently for scammers, they are easy to research out on the open internet and you should refuse any prompts to participate in this ridiculous “security” exercise. Instead, treat security questions like passwords, generate random answers to random questions, and store them in your 1Password along with your passwords.
Disk encryption. Always ensure that your computers use disk encryption. For example, on Macs this total no-brainer feature is called “File Vault”. This feature ensures that if your computer gets stolen, an attacker won’t be able to get the hard disk and go to town on all your data.
Internet of Things. More like @internetofshit. Whenever possible, avoid “smart” devices, which are essentially incredibly insecure, internet-connected computers that gather tons of data, get hacked all the time, and that people willingly place into their homes. These things have microphones, and they routinely send data back to the mothership for analytics and to “improve customer experience” lol ok. As an example, in my younger and naive years I once purchased a CO2 monitor from China that demanded to know everything about me and my precise physical location before it would tell me the amount of CO2 in my room. These devices are a huge and very common attack surface on your privacy and security and should be avoided.
Messaging. I recommend Signal instead of text messages because it end-to-end encrypts all your communications. In addition, it does not store metadata like many other apps do (e.g. iMessage, WhatsApp). Turn on disappearing messages (e.g. 90 days default is good). In my experience they are an information vulnerability with no significant upside.
Browser. I recommend Brave browser, which is a privacy-first browser based on Chromium. That means that basically all Chrome extensions work out of the box and the browser feels like Chrome, but without Google having front row seats to your entire digital life.
Search engine. I recommend Brave search, which you can set up as your default in the browser settings. Brave Search is a privacy-first search engine with its own index, unlike e.g. Duck Duck Go which is basically a nice skin for Bing, and is forced into weird partnerships with Microsoft that compromise user privacy. As with all services on this list, I pay $3/mo for Brave Premium because I prefer to be the customer, not the product in my digital life. I find that empirically, about 95% of my search engine queries are super simple website lookups, with the search engine basically acting as a tiny DNS. And if you’re not finding what you’re looking for, fallback to Google by just prepending “!g” to your search query, which will redirect it to Google.
Credit cards. Mint new, unique credit cards per merchant. There is no need to use one credit card on many services. This allows them to “link up” your purchasing across different services, and additionally it opens you up to credit card fraud because the services might leak your credit card number. I like and use privacy.com to mint new credit cards for every single transaction or merchant. You get a nice interface for all your spending and notifications for each swipe. You can also set limits on each credit card (e.g. $50/month etc.), which dramatically decreases the risk of being charged more than you expect. Additionally, with a privacy.com card you get to enter totally random information for your name and address when filling out billing information. This is huge, because there is simply no need and totally crazy that random internet merchants should be given your physical address. Which brings me to…
Address. There is no need to give out your physical address to the majority of random services and merchants on the internet. Use a virtual mail service. I currently use Earth Class Mail but tbh I’m a bit embarrassed by that and I’m looking to switch to Virtual Post Mail due to its much strong commitments to privacy, security, and its ownership structure and reputation. In any case, you get an address you can give out, they receive your mail, they scan it and digitize it, they have an app for you to quickly see it, and you can decide what to do with it (e.g. shred, forward, etc.). Not only do you gain security and privacy but also quite a bit of convenience.
Email. I still use gmail just due to sheer convenience, but I’ve started to partially use Proton Mail as well. And while we’re on email, a few more thoughts. Never click on any link inside any email you receive. Email addresses are extremely easy to spoof and you can never be guaranteed that the email you got is a phishing email from a scammer. Instead, I manually navigate to any service of interest and log in from there. In addition, disable image loading by default in your email’s settings. If you get an email that requires you to see images, you can click on “show images” to see them and it’s not a big deal at all. This is important because many services use embedded images to track you - they hide information inside the image URL you get, so when your email client loads the image, they can see that you opened the email. There’s just no need for that. Additionally, confusing images are one way scammers hide information to avoid being filtered by email servers as scam / spam.
VPN. If you wish to hide your IP/location to services, you can do so via VPN indirection. I recommend Mullvad VPN. I keep VPN off by default, but enable it selectively when I’m dealing with services I trust less and want more protection from.
DNS-based blocker. You can block ads by blocking entire domains at the DNS level. I like and use NextDNS, which blocks all kinds of ads and trackers. For more advanced users who like to tinker, pi-hole is the physical alternative.
Network monitor. I like and use The Little Snitch, which I have installed and running on my MacBook. This lets you see which apps are communicating, how much data and when, so you can keep track of what apps on your computer “call home” and how often. Any app that communicates too much is sus, and should potentially be uninstalled if you don’t expect the traffic.
Work-life separation. Ideally, do not log in or access any of your personal services on work computers. Most of them have company-operated spyware installed on them to protect the company’s intellectual property. This is all well and good and makes sense, but you should know that any activity on the computer is quite likely extensively logged (networking, keyloggers, screenshots, etc.) and possibly actively monitored by the security department.
I just want to live a secure digital life and establish harmonious relationships with products and services that leak only the necessary information. And I wish to pay for the software I use so that incentives are aligned and so that I am the customer. This is not trivial, but it is possible to approach with some determination and discipline.
Finally, what’s not on the list. I mostly still use Gmail + Gsuite because it’s just too convenient and pervasive. I also use 𝕏 instead of something exotic (e.g. Mastodon), trading off sovereignty for convenience. I don’t use a VoIP burner phone service (e.g. MySudo) but I am interested in it. I don’t really mint new/unique email addresses (e.g. SimpleLogin) but I want to. The journey continues. Let me know if there are other tips and tricks that should be on this list, e.g. you can DM me on 𝕏 at @karpathy.
taylor.town
Personal blog of Taylor Troesh, found via are.na, with all kinds of interesting musings. He writes about “learning, time, design, software, ideas, and humor”.
“How can I risk the truth even more?”
Maria Bowler in conversation with Emily Mohn-Slate about the intersection of mindfulness and creative practice.
The weekly review - Austin Kleon
Hey y’all,
Today I wanted to talk about a tool that has been working for me lately: the weekly review.
I learned it from my friend Alan Jacobs, who, like me, is unfussy about “productivity” tools. His only real task-management tool is a calendar, and he uses that calendar to schedule regular times for reviewing his notes. He says:
No, the tools don’t really matter to me, and I have learned not to fuss about them. What’s essential is scheduling time — I set aside an hour each Monday morning and a whole morning on or near the first of every month — to go over all of those notes and do a kind of self-assessment. I sit down with my notebook and my computer and ask: Where am I in my current projects? What did I accomplish last week? What do I need to think about further? Is there any research or reading I need to be doing? What should be my priorities this week (or this month)? That kind of thing.
The minute I heard Alan explain this I knew it was exactly what I was missing in my creative life.
I’ve written about the importance of revisiting notebooks and how I’ve even created a blog widget to pull up old posts from my archives. And you could argue that my Friday newsletter is already a kind of weekly review. But that’s a public review — I’m going back through my week, and picking things that interested me that I think would interest y’all. What I also need is a private weekly review, a little bit of time for reflection. A system for getting my bearings. Figuring out where I’ve been and where I want to go next.
Speaking of not knowing where I’ve been and the need for review: I’m just now remembering that David Allen writes about the need for a weekly review in his classic, Getting Things Done.
Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.
Allen suggests blocking out two hours early every Friday afternoon, to “clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind.“
Alan does Monday morning. Allen says Friday afternoon. Because I’m a weirdo, I’ve actually been doing my weekly review on Saturday morning, right after I get done writing in my diary.
Here’s what it looks like (yes, I know it’s weird to talk about needing a private review and then sharing it):
I do not expect this image to make any kind of sense to anyone other than me! But let me try to explain. Basically, what’s going on here is that I’m making two maps of my mind, divided by a line 2/3 down the page.
The map on top is for the things I was into or the things that happened during the week. I fill this out by re-reading my diary and my logbook and my blog and my newsletters.
The map on the bottom is for things I want to research or write about during the upcoming week. I often copy things from last week’s weekly review that I didn’t get to into this space.
(I make maps instead of lists because it activates the visual part of my brain — there’s something about seeing everything laid out in space that helps me see connections between everything. I would guess that for other people written lists might work better.)
And that’s it, really. Takes maybe a half hour to 45 minutes, but it’s really paid off over the last month or so and helped me keep better track of what I’m up to.
I’m going to stop there because I’d like to hear from y’all. Do you do a weekly review? What works best for you? Tell us in the comments:
(If anyone wants to share images, I’ll also start a thread in the chat.)
xoxo,
Austin
Story of a Poem: A Memoir: Amazon.co.uk: Zapruder, Matthew: 9781951213688: Books
From Austin Kleon’s newsletter, who has this to say about the book:
“Zapruder shares the ongoing drafts of a poem he’s working on — very #showyourwork — while also meditating on his experiences with writing poetry and being the father of an autistic son. Could a book be more up my alley? The way he unpacks his feelings about giftedness, overachieving, language, disability, and difference really spoke to me.”
Not everything will be okay (but some things will) - Austin Kleon
An image by Ryan Thacker at the end of Maira Kalman’s Creative Mornings talk
“There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, **Bright-Sided
You know you’re in a bad spot when passing sidewalk chalk platitudes on your daily walk makes you murderous.
For me, yesterday, the breaking point was a hand-painted sign that read “EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY.”
What fucking planet are these people living on?
My favorite cinematic misanthropes started conversing with each other.
“Where do they teach you how to talk like this?” Melvin Udall asked.
“What absolute twaddle,” Withnail agreed.
I was reminded of the story of G.K. Chesterton’s book, Platitudes Undone**:
In 1911, author Holbrook Jackson published a small book of aphorisms under the (mildly pretentious) title Platitudes in the Making: Precepts and Advices for Gentlefolk and gave a copy to his friend G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, it seems, sat down with the book – and a green pencil – and wrote a response to each saying in the book. Presumably he then set the book down, and somehow, someway, it turned up in a San Francisco book shop in 1955, where it was purchased by a certain Dr. Alfred Kessler, an admirer of Chesterton. Every book collector dreams of such a find. Rather than keep the book to himself, however, Dr. Kessler and Ignatius Press have produced a facsimile edition. Remove the dust jacket, and you have a reproduction, in every particular, of that 1911 volume, together with all of Chesterton’s remarks. It’s a remarkable project, and a real treat for readers of Chesterton.
People are dying. Our leaders are corrupt. Things are not good.
But there’s still sunshine and birds and Gene Kelly dancing.
If we are going to paint the neighborhood with slogans, let’s at least honor each other’s grief and intelligence.
everything will be okay.
NOT everything will be okay BUT SOME THINGS WILL.
A spring bouquet
Hey y’all,
I’m in a gathering mood. Montaigne said he made bouquets of out of other writer’s flowers. I feel like making a spring bouquet.
Yesterday was the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. The earth’s tilt is perpendicular to the sun’s rays, and it will now slowly tilt towards the light. We’re headed for summer now, while our neighbors in the southern hemisphere are headed towards winter.
I used to be “Mr. Autumn Man,” but spring and the new growth has meant more to me in recent years because of our new normal of nasty winter storms here in Austin, Texas.
I started spring off last year by reading Martin Gayford’s Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. It was the right book at just the right time. If you’re looking for a lift, I can’t recommend it enough.
Hockney is one of my favorite artists. In Keep GoingI wrote that I want to make his words my own motto: “I’ll go on until I fall over.” (I also wrote about him and his relationship to technology around this time last year.)
In the studio I have a poster from his “The Arrival of Spring” show and near my desk I have a picture of him that stares at me, as if he’s saying, “Well? What are you waiting on? GET TO WORK.”
During the lockdown Hockney wrote:
I intend to carry on with my work, which I now see as very important. We have lost touch with nature rather foolishly as we are a part of it, not outside it. This will in time be over and then what? What have we learned? I am 83 years old, I will die. The cause of death is birth. The only real things in life are food and love in that order, just like our little dog Ruby. I really believe this and the source of art is love. I love life.
(A spring earworm has suddenly stuck in my head: Buck Owens singing “Love’s Gonna Live Here.”)
A page from Keep Going
In Joy Williams’ essay “Autumn” she writes about being careful about the optimism of spring:
There is no such thing as time going straight on to new things. This is an illusion. Okay? And clinging to this illusion makes it difficult to understand oneself and one’s life and what is happening to one. Time is repetition, a circle. This is obvious. Day and night, the seasons, tell us this. Even so, we don’t believe it. Time is not a circle, we think. Spring screams the opposite to us, of course, and summer seduces us into believing that we’re all going to live forever….
Horace was not seduced! Here he is in The Odes (IV, 7):
Gone is the whiteness
And neither was Philip Larkin — this is the time of year I recite his poem “The Trees” to myself: “The trees are coming into leaf / like something almost being said” but “their greenness is a kind of grief…”
While we’re on the subject of dark mixing with the light — gardening has provided me with yet another creative metaphor. I came across this fact while cutting up a book for the collage at the top of the page:
“Botanists used to think that the length of daylight a plant was exposed to determines whether it would form flowers. But… it’s the length of darkness that a plant experiences that plays the most crucial role.”
A taxonomy of plants:
(1) long-day (or, more accurately, short-night) plants that normally bloom in spring and summer
Like my friend Clayton Cubitt says, “The photographic rules of exposure also apply to life: you either need more light, or more time. And all the time in the world won’t help you if you don’t have any light.”
A snippet of my zine, The Creative Seasons
“I suppose an artist or any person who continues to grow is like a tree or any living thing,” writes Martin Gayford. “A plant takes in water, minerals, light, and carbon dioxide and transforms them into leaves and flowers. In the same way, people who continue to blossom also need to carry on processing fresh thoughts and experiences.”
But you must know what season you’re in! For me, this has been the year that somehow refuses to get started. But maybe the spring will also be a creative spring. It’s feeling just like it might be….
xoxo,
Austin
More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI : Warner, John: Amazon.co.uk: Books
Product description
Review
“Warner offers smart commentary on the downsides of AI, particularly its ability to bypass critical thinking, and the suggestions on adjusting to the software’s increasing popularity are thought-provoking… This provides plenty of food for thought.”–Publisher’s Weekly
“In lively prose and with many engaging personal anecdotes, [Warner] deftly explains how ChatGPT mines data for examples to imitate… anyone who loves to read and write, who teaches excellence and personal achievement, and who remains convinced that people are unique will find this book a welcome arrow in their humanist quiver.”–Kirkus Reviews
“A necessary intervention in all the marketing hype and overpromising about artificial intelligence. This book is a must-read for anyone who feels pressured to adopt this new technology: teachers, students, professional writers, and nonprofessional writers (emailers, all of us) alike. Warner challenges the notion we aren’t ‘innovating’ or ‘optimizing’ or churning out ‘content’ fast enough. He explores why writing, particularly in school, has become such an awful chore–for students to produce and teachers to grade. The fix here isn’t new software that promises to make brainstorming and drafting a breeze. Rather, we must revitalize the practices of care and curiosity together, and, in doing so, help foster our understanding of one another–an exercise in civics, not just in essay composition. More Than Words is honest about the struggles we all have with crafting written language, but it helps us see the real dangers that will come with its automation.”–Audrey Watters, author of Teaching Machines
“Does AI threaten the art of writing itself? As Warner’s wise, warm, and much-needed intervention shows us, the answer is no. By automating the production of low-quality text, AI companies can, however, threaten the practice and economics of writing. This lucid and compelling book gives us the tools to reject and resist what’s noxious about generative AI and to meaningfully engage with what it means to write, as a human, in a world increasingly overrun by cheap and meaningless content.”–Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine
“Oh, how I’ve been waiting for this book! With his many years of experience as a writing teacher, Warner is the perfect guide for helping us understand what AI means for writers. Now is the perfect opportunity to rethink our ideas about writing and what’s so special about being a human who works with words. I stole a ton of inspiration from this book and so will you.”–Austin Kleon, author of New York Times bestseller Steal Like an Artist
“Reading this new contribution from Warner makes us realize what we’ve been missing in other works about, or generated by, AI: experienced, authentic writing by someone in charge of their craft, fully respecting the human on the other end. This work is deeply readable. Not that it is simplistic, but instead, that it’s so well written and deeply substantive that we find it moving and applicable. Sign me up for this level of cogency.”–Rick Wormeli, author of Fair Isn’t Always Equal
“This book is essential reading for everyone–writers, students, teachers, parents, administrators–navigating the evolving landscape of AI writing tools and tech company hype. Warner makes a powerful case for the role of writing as thinking, writing as feeling, and writing as a human practice that will endure in the AI era. Warner’s clear-eyed wisdom about writing and teaching, and his engaging–and very human–voice, will leave readers inspired, informed, and optimistic about the future of writing.”–Jane Rosenzweig, director, Harvard College Writing Center
“This is the book with everything you need to know about writing and AI all in one place, lucidly and passionately argued. Every teacher and every professor should have this book. Every legislator, every policymaker. Every parent and every student. Every publisher of newspapers, websites, and books. Here, John Warner exposes the ethical wasteland of replacing human writing with machine-made ‘content.’ He warns of the profound environmental costs of AI–trillions of gallons of water to cool data servers that produce nonsense no one wants or needs. And he reminds us only humans can write and only humans can read, and that writing is thinking–and if we allow machines to write for ourselves, then we’ve allowed them to think for us, too. And that is the sorriest thing a human could do. But Warner provides a better path. This is a scary book, but a hopeful one, too, and an absolutely essential one.”–Dave Eggers
“All educators should read this thoughtful analysis of the impact of generative artificial intelligence on themselves, their students, and education more generally. Warner’s arguments rest on the notion that authentic writing tasks are fully intertwined with thinking, feeling, and learning. But from those foundations, he discovers deeper insights about how humans and machines interact, and why we should never allow automation to supplant the work that makes us human.”–James M. Lang, author of Distracted
About the Author
John Warner is a writer, speaker, researcher, and consultant. The former editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, he is the author of the books Why They Can’t Write and The Writer’s Practice. As “the Biblioracle,” Warner is a weekly columnist at the Chicago Tribune and writes the newsletter The Biblioracle Recommends. He is affiliate faculty at the College of Charleston and lives in Folly Beach, South Carolina.
Art advice with Beth Pickens
Hey y’all,
Last week I had the pleasure to chat with art coach Beth Pickens, author of Make Your Art No Matter What and *Your Art Will Save Your Life**. *Beth and I share many of the same core messages, but I come at making art from the inside of being a working artist and Beth comes at it from the outside of working with artists, so she picks up things that I miss.
You can watch our conversation in the video above or listen to it below:
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Beth started out with a list of 10 tips for artists based on the things her clients are dealing with right now. I drew them out on index cards:
Beth converted to Judaism by way of feminism (all the feminist writers she liked were Jewish) and I really enjoy hearing about how her religious practice has influenced her work. She hipped me to the importance of taking a day off and Rabbi Heschel’s The Sabbath, which has become one of my favorite books.
Before our conversation, I re-read my notes in her books and wrote them out on index cards as a way to refresh.
Beth believes that the artist needs to do 3 things:
- Consume as much art as they can.
- Join a community of artists and build relationships.
- Make their art no matter what.
In other words: steal, share, and keep going.
My favorite idea of Beth’s is that artists suffer when they don’t make their art.
“Artists are people who are profoundly compelled to make their creative work,” she writes, “and when they are distanced from their practice, their life quality suffers.”
For years, the message I got was: If you can do anything else, you should. *That confused me, because I thought, *Well, sure, I could do anything else. I could be a damned surgeon if I wanted to! *But now I know that if I don’t do creative work… I suffer. I’m not a whole person. If I don’t show up to the studio, it’s harder to show up for the people in my life. (A lesson I learned the hard way as a young dad.) Sure, I *could do something else, but to not have a creative practice would diminish me and make me a not-so-nice person to be around.
Here are more (personal) notes I doodled from our chat:
As always, I’d love to hear what resonates with y’all and what you’d like to hear more about.
And if you’d like to check out Beth’s Homework Club, she’s offered our gang a discount code with one free month off: MakeYourWork.
xoxo,
Austin
3-2-1: On the shortness of life, what mastery requires, and how to overlap the things you love
3 IDEAS FROM ME
I.
“Move toward the next thing, not away from the last thing.
Same direction. Completely different energy.”
II.
“Guilt lives in the past.
Worry lives in the future.
Peace lives in the present.”
III.
“Mastery requires lots of practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes.
Thus, an essential component of mastery is the ability to maintain your enthusiasm. The master continues to find the fundamentals interesting.”
2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS
I.
Novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson on the shortness of life:
“Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.”
Source: **Crabbed Age and Youth (1877)
II.
Travel writer and essayist Alice Wellington Rollins on the importance of drive:
“The test of a student is not how much he knows, but how much he wants to know.”
Source: **Aphorisms for the Year (1897)
1 QUESTION FOR YOU
How can I overlap the things I enjoy?
For example, maybe you want to exercise and spend time with your spouse. What type of exercise sounds fun to do with your spouse?
Or perhaps you’d like to hang out with friends and build your career. How can you find ways to work with people you like being around?
It doesn’t always work, but there are usually a few areas of life you can overlap in an enjoyable way. Look for the overlap.
Until next week,
James Clear
Atomic Habits**, the #1 best-selling book
*Atoms**, the official Atomic Habits app *
3-2-1 newsletter** with 3 million subscribers
The Enduring Metal Genius of Metallica
The merch preceded them. Forty-eight hours before Metallica performed in Las Vegas, restaurants and bars along the Strip were crammed full of pilgrims dressed in branded gear: T-shirts, jerseys, sweatshirts, sneakers, tank tops, hats, beanies, socks, wristwatches. The most grizzled devotees wore fraying denim vests decorated with several decades’ worth of patches. Metallica’s licensing team estimates that about a hundred and twenty million Metallica T-shirts have been sold since 1995. The motifs are iconic. There’s the one where a hand clutching a dagger emerges from a toilet, alongside the phrase “Metal Up Your Ass.” There’s the one where a skull is wearing scrubs and performing brain surgery with a fork, a knife, and its fangs. There’s the one where the skull has a fistful of stumpy straws and is announcing, “This shortest straw has been pulled for you!” You get the idea.
Metallica is now in its forty-first year. The band was a progenitor, along with Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth, of thrash, a subgenre of heavy metal marked by thick, suffocating riffs, played with astonishing speed. Lyrical themes include death, despair, power, grief, and wrath. Though metal is often dismissed as underground music—frantic, savage, niche—Metallica has sold some hundred and twenty-five million records to date, putting the band on par, commercially, with Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z. It is the only musical group to have performed on all seven continents in a single calendar year. (In 2013, Metallica played a ten-song set in Antarctica for a group of research scientists and contest winners; because of the fragile ice formations, the band’s amplifiers were placed in isolation cabinets, and the concert was broadcast through headphones.) Since 1990, every Metallica album has débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
In 2009, Metallica was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. A speech was given by Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who described the band’s music as “this beautiful, violent thing that was unlike anything I’d ever heard before in my life,” and called its motivation pure. “This is outsider music, and for it to do what it has done is truly mind-blowing,” he said. Metallica is the only metal group to have had its music added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. Kim Kardashian has been photographed in a Metallica shirt on at least two occasions. Beavis sported one for the entire nine-season run of “Beavis and Butt-Head.” Though the band has made adjustments to its sound through the years—some minor, some seismic, all irritating to certain subsets of its fan base—it’s hard to think of another act that has outlasted the whims of the culture with such vigor. The band recently finished writing and recording its eleventh record, which will be released next year. “Metallica are the Marines of metal,” Scott Ian, a founder of Anthrax, told me recently. “First one in, last one out.”
Metallica’s current lineup includes the singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and the drummer Lars Ulrich, both of whom co-founded the band; the lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, who joined in 1983; and the bassist Robert Trujillo, a member since 2003. Hetfield—fifty-nine, tall, graying at the temples—moves with the confident saunter of a well-armed cowboy. Ulrich, fifty-eight, radiates so much kinetic energy that it’s hard to imagine him yawning. Hammett, fifty-nine, and Trujillo, fifty-eight, are the band’s gentle, long-haired surfers, jazz enthusiasts disinclined to dramatics. If Hetfield is Metallica’s heart—its musical center and primary lyricist—Ulrich is its brain, a visionary who instinctively understands cultural terrain.
The night before the Vegas show, the band gathered at Allegiant Stadium for sound check. A scrum of about a dozen people, mostly from Metallica’s touring crew, stood on the floor to watch. (The band’s full road team has at least a hundred members.) Derek Carr, the quarterback for the Las Vegas Raiders, appeared, looking as though he were resisting an intense urge to play air guitar. Some clients of the private-plane company NetJets sat in the stands, enjoying specialty cocktails and cheering. The band periodically gathered around Ulrich’s drum kit. “Is there anything anyone wants to run?” Ulrich asked. But everyone knew what to do. At one point, Trujillo glanced out at the vacant seats and dad-joked, “I thought we were playing a sold-out show.” Even in a mostly empty stadium, the band sounded powerful, lucid, heavy.
The next afternoon, a pre-show event was scheduled for the House of Blues, somewhere in the belly of the Mandalay Bay casino. I sent a series of increasingly disoriented texts to a friend—“I’m in the casino, where are you?” “I’m in the casino?”—before we found each other. We were both wearing vintage T-shirts featuring the cemetery-themed art from “Master of Puppets,” the band’s third album.
At the bar, we lined up for plastic cups of the band’s own Blackened whiskey, a bourbon-rye blend that’s finished in brandy casks while Metallica songs blare from large speakers. A product description credits the music with enhancing the spirit’s flavor: “The whiskey is pummeled by low-hertz soundwaves which force the whiskey deeper into the wood of the barrel, where it picks up additional wood flavor characteristics.” It tasted nice. You could feel an anticipatory flutter in the air. COVID-19 had grounded Metallica for long stretches of 2020 and 2021. (My backstage pass featured a skull with a wispy Mohawk self-administering a COVID test—the results, of course, were positive.) Fans were slapping one another on the back, hooting about how much they had missed this. The feeling was: Let’s pop off. People were ready to have a good-ass time—to drink too many beers, to forget their earplugs, to buy a new Metallica T-shirt with demons on it and wiggle it on over an old Metallica T-shirt with demons on it, to headbang, to contort their fingers into devil’s horns and thrust them upward, to go “Ahhh!” when the pyro shot off, to shriek “Searching . . . seek and destroy!” along with fifty thousand other wild-eyed people, to turn to a friend and mouth “Yo!” when someone was soloing. Greta Van Fleet, a young rock band from Michigan, was opening for Metallica throughout the year. “Metallica has curated their own culture, and you can see the impact that’s had when you look out into the audience,” Greta Van Fleet’s singer, Josh Kiszka, told me. “Driving to the venue, it’s Metallica everywhere. That’s part of how the band has changed the world a little bit.”
From afar, it is easy to see Metallica as an instigating force—an accelerant, turning unruly hooligans more unruly. But that idea alone can’t sustain a devoted following for decades. As we sipped our whiskey, my companion, August Thompson, a Metallica fan since his boyhood in rural New Hampshire, told me his favorite lyric, from “Escape,” a thick and charging song from “Ride the Lightning” (1984): “Life’s for my own, to live my own way.” Hetfield repeats the sentiment, with slightly different phrasing, on “Nothing Else Matters,” a song from “Metallica” (1991): “Life is ours, we live it our way.” “For people like me, who always felt out of place in a hyper-violent world, and the hyper-violence that is masculinity, there’s a lot of solace in that,” Thompson said. Metallica’s music is rooted in feelings of marginalization, and the band, despite its achievements, has found a way to maintain that point of view for more than forty years. It makes sense that people are drawn to Metallica’s music, because they’re ill at ease in a culture that relentlessly valorizes things (money, love, straight teeth) that are very easy to be born without.
That night, Metallica opened its set with “Whiplash,” from “Kill ’Em All,” its début album. On the floor, mosh pits formed; from the stands, they resembled tiny riptides, bodies circling one another, sometimes submitting to a menacing current but mostly just orbiting. If you squinted, it almost looked like an ancient folk dance—something that might happen at a Greek wedding, late, after people had been drinking. “I think the best seat in the arena is the second tier up, where you get to see the band but you also get to see all the fans,” Hetfield told me later. “Forget the band—look at the audience.”
These days, the set list is mostly old songs, and the vibe is largely benevolent. Hetfield’s voice is low and scratchy, and can shift from contemplative to feral in a single note. He is prone to ending his phrases with a tight, curled snarl. He can still transform a “Yeah!” into a vast and terrifying invocation. He can also be tender and earnest, which has recently led fans to call him Papa Het. “This song goes out to all who struggle,” Hetfield said before “Fade to Black,” a ballad about suicide. “If you think you’re the only one, it’s a lie. You can talk to your friends, talk to somebody, because you are not alone.”
The band closed its encore with “Enter Sandman,” another single from “Metallica.” Even if metal is not your bag, it’s hard to deny the menacing perfection of the song’s opening riff: an E-minor chord, a wah-wah pedal, a sense that something dark and creepy is about to happen. During the chorus, I looked over at Thompson, who had the dazed and exuberant look of someone who had been cured of a disease by an itinerant preacher. All around us, people were rapt, ecstatic, and free. “I get up there and sing, and I watch people change,” Hetfield told me.
Hetfield was born in Downey, California, in 1963. His mother, Cynthia, had two sons from a previous marriage. His father, Virgil, had fought in the Second World War and started a trucking company when he returned to California. “He did not have a great childhood,” Hetfield said of his father. “My grandfather was some crazy musician who came through town, and then off he went—imagine that,” he added, laughing. His parents were devout Christian Scientists, and had met in church, where Virgil helped lead a weekly service. But Hetfield never connected with the religion. “It felt lonely,” he said. “When my dad was up there reading from the Scriptures, he was getting tears in his eyes. It moved him. I didn’t get it. I thought something was wrong with me.” Hetfield recalled being embarrassed when he wasn’t allowed to attend health class, or receive a physical to play football. “I still carry shame about that,” he said. “How different we were to people.”
When Hetfield was thirteen, his father left. “I went off to church camp, and I came back and he was gone,” he recalled. Two years later, his mother developed cancer, but refused medical treatment on religious grounds. “We watched her wither to nothing,” he said. “She had religion around her, inside her. She had practitioners coming over. But the cancer was stronger.” Hetfield is still not entirely sure what type of cancer she had. “Probably something really curable,” he said. For a long time, Hetfield was angry that his mother had rebuffed doctors. “I thought she cared more about religion than she did her kids,” he said. “It wasn’t talked about, either—if you’re talking about it, you’re giving it power, and you want to take power away from it. So admitting that you’re sick, that’s a no-no. We just saw it happening.” Cynthia died when Hetfield was sixteen. “There was nothing solid to stand on,” he said. “I felt extremely lost.” On “The God That Failed,” an angry, punishing cut from “Metallica,” Hetfield sings about the experience: “Broken is the promise, betrayal / The healing hand held back by the deepened nail.”
Ulrich had a very different sort of childhood. He was born in Gentofte, Denmark, in 1963. His father, Torben, was both a professional tennis player and a jazz critic (the saxophonist Dexter Gordon was Ulrich’s godfather), and his family was worldly and cultured. (“We ate McDonald’s, he ate herring,” Hetfield once said of the cultural divide.) Ulrich came to the U.S. in 1979, when he was fifteen, to attend tennis camp. He ended up at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, in Bradenton, Florida. He had been a promising youth player in Denmark, but he found the strictures of American athletic training stifling. “Curfew at 9 P.M., ten o’clock lights out, four to a bunk room, and then wake up and eat cornflakes and start hitting forehands down the line for four hours, and then backhands crosscourt for the next four hours,” he said. “That was just too stringent and disciplined for me.” When Ulrich was sixteen, his family relocated to Newport Beach, California. “In Denmark, I was at the very top end of my age group in the whole country,” he said. “When I went to qualify for the tennis team at Corona del Mar High School, I wasn’t one of the seven best tennis players at Corona del Mar High School. I don’t think I was one of the seven best tennis players on the street that I lived on.” Ulrich switched his focus to music. He was captivated by what was then called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal—bands that mixed the fury and speed of punk rock with the density and danger of metal. “When people would go, ‘Heavy metal? You mean like Kansas and Van Halen and Styx and Journey?,’ I’d go, ‘No, like Angel Witch or Saxon or Diamond Head or the Tygers of Pan Tang,’ ” he said.
“He’s guarding against plaque.”Cartoon by Michael Maslin
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In 1981, Ulrich, seeking musicians interested in starting a band, placed a classified ad in the back of The Recycler, a free periodical that was originally known as E-Z Buy E-Z Sell. A friend of Hetfield’s answered the ad, and Hetfield tagged along. “He was painfully shy,” Ulrich said. “We instantly bonded over the fact that we were loners and outsiders, and open to a best-friend relationship. Neither of us had really found who we were yet.” Though their approaches to songwriting were different—“He looks at music as a math equation, I look at it as a flowing river,” Hetfield said—they complemented each other. “Both of us were dreamers. At our best, our relationship was completely free of competitive energy or one-up-ness,” Ulrich said. “But then when there were other people in the room it became ‘Who is leading?’ ”
Hetfield and Ulrich recruited a second guitarist, Dave Mustaine, by placing another ad in The Recycler. In 1982, Hetfield and Ulrich saw a group called Trauma perform at the Whisky a Go Go, a club on the Sunset Strip. They were awed by Cliff Burton, Trauma’s twenty-year-old bass player, and began trying to persuade him to join Metallica. Scott Ian, of Anthrax, said, “There was Cliff in his flares and his Lynyrd Skynyrd pin”—an affront to the punk-indebted aesthetics of the thrash scene, which included leather jackets, hefty boots, and studded belts. Unlike the members of Metallica, Burton had some musical training. He played fingerpicked bass with the boldness and harmonic sophistication of a guitarist. “He was always doing tricky stuff that would make me think, Fuck, man, where is this guy getting this from?” Kirk Hammett said. “He was just so . . . musical.”
In order to get Burton, who was based in El Cerrito, a small city across the bay from San Francisco, Hetfield and Ulrich agreed to move there, renting an unassuming house on Carlson Boulevard and rehearsing in the garage. Mustaine moved into a unit on Burton’s grandmother’s property. Times were lean. “We’d find a tomato and some mayonnaise and make tomato sandwiches and think we were highbrow metalheads,” Mustaine recalled. Ulrich described the band’s early days as feeling immediate, uncomplicated: “There was only that moment, and ‘Where’s the beer?’ ”
In early 1983, Metallica was signed by Jonny Zazula—better known as Jonny Z.—a part-time concert promoter who sold heavy-metal records at an indoor flea market on Route 18 in East Brunswick, New Jersey. It was still difficult to buy imported metal albums at mainstream record shops, and a scene of sorts had sprung up around Zazula’s booth. One weekend, Zazula asked Scott Ian if he wanted to hear “No Life ’Til Leather,” a seven-song demo that Metallica recorded before Burton joined. The songs were raw and deranged, distinguished by the band’s adolescent mania and Hetfield’s tendency to down-pick, which resulted in a thicker, heavier feel. “Holy fuck,” Ian said. “Nothing sounded like that before Metallica. Straight up. It was like electricity was coming out of the tape player. Jonny Z. said, ‘I’m bringing them to New York. We’re gonna make an album.’ I’m, like, ‘You know how to do that?’ And he goes, ‘No!’ ”
Zazula and his wife, Marsha, founded Megaforce Records after shopping the Metallica demo around and failing to get an offer. When the Zazulas started Megaforce, Jonny Z. was serving a six-month sentence in a halfway house, for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. (He’d been employed by a company that passed off scrap metal as tantalum, a rare element used in the manufacture of capacitors.) He spent his weekdays feeding quarters into a pay phone, attempting to book shows. “I just got caught in this passion, like there’s this little Led Zeppelin hanging out in El Cerrito, you know?” Zazula, who died earlier this year, told Mick Wall, the author of “Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica.” Zazula sent the band members fifteen hundred dollars so they could drive east in a U-Haul with their gear. In “Mustaine,” a 2010 autobiography, Mustaine remembers rolling out of bed, “bleary eyed, hungover, and smelling like bad cottage cheese,” and noticing the truck parked out front. “We stopped for beer less than a mile after pulling out of the driveway and remained in a drunken stupor for most of the trip,” he wrote.
Although Mustaine was integral to Metallica’s early sound and songwriting, Hetfield and Ulrich felt that his ferocious drinking made him a liability—no small feat in a group that would later embrace the nickname Alcoholica. Not long after Metallica arrived on the East Coast, Mustaine was handed a bus ticket back to California. “I went to the only place that I could go to—my mom’s—and started over,” Mustaine said. That year, he formed Megadeth, which has sold fifty million records to date, and which recently released its sixteenth album, “The Sick, the Dying . . . and the Dead!”
Mark Whitaker, who managed Exodus, another Bay Area metal band, suggested Kirk Hammett, Exodus’s twenty-year-old lead guitarist, to replace Mustaine. Hammett was born in San Francisco in 1962. He liked comic books and horror movies, and his mother, who was Filipino, turned him on to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Hammett wasn’t close with his father, a merchant marine. “When he drank, he was violent. When he wasn’t drunk, he was verbally abusive,” Hammett said. “I was a compulsive reader, and he would say things like ‘Kirk, he’s a bookworm, he’s not good at football,’ or whatever. I saw a lot of brutal behavior when I was a kid. Who’s the toughest? Who’s the meanest? Who’s the most dominant? Some of that rubbed off on me.”
That spring, Metallica invited Hammett to come east to audition. It was his first time outside California. “I might as well have landed on Mars,” Hammett told me. He had first encountered the band at a metal showcase in San Francisco. “James was quiet, and probably the skinniest person I’d ever seen. Lars . . . I’d never seen someone so European-looking. I was from the hood, you know? I grew up around a bunch of Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese, and African Americans. I didn’t see Europeans. I didn’t even see full-on white people.” The meeting was brief, and blurred by alcohol. “When I came out to New York, I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure they remembered me or what I looked like,” Hammett said. The first song he played with the band was “Seek and Destroy.” He got the job. At the time, Metallica was living in a run-down practice space in Jamaica, Queens. There was no heat, hot water, showers, or beds. “I would wrap my leather jacket into a pillow,” Hammett said.
“Kill ’Em All” was released on July 25, 1983, on Zazula’s Megaforce Records. Hetfield describes the record’s themes as “headbanging, death, and blood.” “Ride the Lightning” followed a year later. From the start, Metallica refused to capitulate, stylistically or otherwise, to anything happening around it. “They have, more than any other major modern band, consistently ignored what other groups were trying to do,” the critic Chuck Klosterman told me. The band members dressed as though they spent most of their days loitering outside a gas station. Their music was harsh, fast, and difficult. “We were always coming up against people who were telling us, ‘We can’t play you on the radio,’ or ‘You guys are too ugly,’ ” Hammett said.
For Metallica, the idea was never to seduce an audience, but to push it away. The fans who stuck around—who perhaps understood this as a kind of love—became devoted, and received devotion in return.
In 1984, Metallica left Megaforce, signed to Elektra Records, and agreed to a management deal with Q-Prime, a new firm specializing in heavy metal. Cliff Burnstein, an owner of Q-Prime, found that promoting Metallica to a general audience was nearly impossible. America was in the grip of a bizarre moral frenzy—the Satanic Panic, which linked heavy metal with demonic rituals—and the band had cultivated a reputation as dangerous. “When we had a tour, I would get in touch with radio stations along the way and try to get them to play Metallica,” Burnstein recalled. “The typical response I’d get was ‘No, you will never hear Metallica on our station.’ So then my response would be ‘I’d like to give you tickets to give away.’ And the typical response to that was ‘We will not even say the name Metallica on our station.’ ”
To some degree, trepidation was warranted. Burnstein recalled a show at the Felt Forum, a smaller theatre within Madison Square Garden. “During the first song, one person ripped a chair cushion off and flung it onstage. By the end of the song, there was not a cushion left on a chair,” he said. “Instead of getting paid, we paid Madison Square Garden for the damages.” At a particularly calamitous show at the Long Beach Arena, in California, “people were ripping fixtures out of the bathroom, people were hanging from the balcony,” Burnstein said. Hetfield and Ulrich later appeared on the radio to ask fans to stop trashing the venues.
But the Metallica experience was not designed to be friendly. Hetfield would sometimes antagonize the audience, growling, “Hey, any time this stuff gets too heavy for you . . . tough shit!” Offstage, the members of Metallica provoked one another, particularly Ulrich and Hetfield. Their complex, brotherly dynamic—Hetfield was possessive; Ulrich was demanding—sometimes threatened to overwhelm the band. “We would get drunk, and just start in,” Hammett said. “I remember once James got up and pushed Lars, and Lars literally flew across the room. We would see each other and start wrestling. We could be in a room of twenty people and we’d fixate on each other. No one else mattered.” To an extent, Metallica thrived on conflict. “Toxic masculinity has fuelled this band,” Hammett said. “I’m still sitting around saying, ‘O.K., I’m gonna write a really, really tough, kick-ass riff.’ Just look at my rhetoric there: tough, kick-ass riff. It’s an aggression that everyone feels, but it was ratcheted up in us—this weird masculine macho bullshit thing.”
In September, 1985, the band flew to Copenhagen to make its next album, “Master of Puppets.” The record spent seventy-two weeks on the Billboard 200, and became the band’s first album to go gold. Rolling Stone called it “pure apocalyptic dread.” Many still consider it the greatest thrash record of all time. “Master of Puppets” closes with “Damage, Inc.,” a sharp, flogging song that feels like being locked in a batting cage with a malfunctioning pitching machine. Lyrically, it offers both affirmation and absolution. “Fuck it all and fucking no regrets,” Hetfield screams.
In 1986, the band secured a slot opening for Ozzy Osbourne, the former vocalist for Black Sabbath, on the American leg of a solo tour. “I’ve had a special place in my heart for Metallica ever since they went on tour with me in the eighties,” Osbourne told me. “In my opinion, they took over where Sabbath left off, and they deserve everything they’ve achieved.” The run was a success. “Ninety per cent of the people in those sold-out arenas didn’t know who Metallica were, and they blew people’s brains out,” Scott Ian said.
The band in its rehearsal space.Photograph by Ian Allen for The New Yorker
That fall, Metallica headlined a European tour. On September 27th, the band was travelling overnight through Sweden when its bus skidded off the road. Cliff Burton, the bassist, was tossed through a window. Hetfield, Ulrich, and Hammett stood outside in their underwear, in the stark and frigid dawn, staring at Burton’s legs while they waited for a crane to lift the bus off the rest of his body. Burton was twenty-four. His death was sudden and gruesome. Anthrax had been opening for Metallica. “We sat in a room together and just drank and drank,” Ian told me. “It was really hard for them in the late eighties, going into the nineties, never really taking the time to properly grieve or process it.” He paused. “Who knew how to do that?”
Less than a month after Burton’s death, the band hired the bassist Jason Newsted, and soon it began recording its fourth album, “. . . And Justice for All,” which is famous for the single “One,” and for containing almost no audible bass. Whether that was the result of Newsted’s hewing too close to Hetfield’s rhythm guitar, or of hazing born from fresh grief, remains unclear. “When I joined the band, everybody was full alcoholic,” Newsted said. “They had lost their guide. Cliff was their teacher.”
For its fifth album, “Metallica,” in 1991—known as the Black Album because of its “Spinal Tap”-esque monochromatic cover art, which features only a coiled snake and the band’s name—the band hired the Canadian producer Bob Rock, who had previously worked on blockbuster releases by Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and Mötley Crüe. The record’s themes are bleak (the single “Enter Sandman” was written about sudden infant death syndrome), but the songs are limber, catchy, and dynamic. Hammett recalled a conversation with Rock about how the band might achieve even greater fame. “The work doesn’t stop after you finish recording. Every single interview, every single appearance, every single everything—you need to do it all,” Hammett said. “That’s what Jon Bon Jovi did.”
The Black Album ultimately spent six hundred and twenty-five weeks on the Billboard charts and sold almost thirty-five million copies worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time. Five singles—“Enter Sandman,” “The Unforgiven,” “Nothing Else Matters,” “Wherever I May Roam,” and “Sad but True”—entered the Hot 100, and the band became a mainstay on MTV and modern-rock radio. “A lot of people talk down about it, or say that Metallica sold out,” Kerry King, of Slayer, told me. “Would I have wanted another ‘Damage, Inc.’? Fuck yeah. But it wasn’t on that record. And that record made them fucking superstars.”
The following year, the band co-headlined a stadium tour with Guns N’ Roses. At a show in Montreal, there was a miscommunication about pyrotechnic cues during “Fade to Black,” and Hetfield stepped directly into a twelve-foot plume of flame, suffering second- and third-degree burns on his hand and arm. After he was taken to the hospital, Guns N’ Roses waited more than two hours to go on; Axl Rose, Guns N’ Roses’ mercurial front man, then left the stage early. Riots broke out. Cars were turned over, bonfires were started, merch cases were smashed with rocks. In retrospect, Montreal was the end of something. Grunge, a righteous new subset of hard rock, made a point of rejecting the excess and dumbness of the eighties: no more women writhing across the hoods of cars, no more peacocking in skintight leather trousers. Metallica had always repudiated such extravagance—the members wore jeans and black T-shirts and worked hard—but the band was nonetheless at risk of becoming stuck on the wrong side of the cultural divide.
One potential solution was for Metallica to position itself as antithetical to Guns N’ Roses and other bands of that ilk. The 1992 documentary “A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica” features a scene in which Hetfield mocks Rose’s personal backstage rider, which included a cup of cubed ham, a rib-eye-steak dinner, a gourmet cheese tray, a fresh pepperoni pizza, Pringles, and a bottle of what Hetfield calls “Dom Perig-non.” In the video for “Nothing Else Matters,” Ulrich is briefly shown pulling darts out of a photo of Kip Winger, the suave and flashy vocalist for the metal band Winger. In 1996, Metallica released “Load,” its sixth album, which was followed, in 1997, by a companion piece, “Reload.” Both records are loose and bluesy by Metallica standards. Before the release of “Load,” all four members cut their hair short, which made certain fans apoplectic.
Hetfield now believes that “Load” and “Reload” were shaped too acutely by a desire for reinvention. “We’ve always been very organic. ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’ felt different to me,” he said. “Felt forced.” It was an unsteady time for Metallica. In 2000, the band, led by a seething Ulrich, filed a lawsuit against the file-sharing network Napster, after an unreleased version of “I Disappear,” a song recorded for the “Mission: Impossible 2” soundtrack, was leaked on the network. Ulrich insists that the lawsuit was not about money but about control. He was right to be outraged, but the technology was new, he was rich, and most of the people using Napster were college students in pajama pants. Ulrich was demonized. He was also prescient. “I take no solace in that at all,” he told me. “It was a street fight. It was ‘You’re fucking with us, we’re gonna fuck with you.’ And then it just ran amok. In retrospect, could we have done a better job of seeing that coming? Probably.”
In 2001, Newsted left the band, citing physical damage to his body and a dispute with Hetfield about a solo project. “When you’re one of the four that make the thing go round, the sacrifices that you have to make . . . it’s not for everyone, man,” Newsted said. “That’s why there’s only one band like this.” Bob Rock agreed to temporarily fill in on bass as Metallica began work on “St. Anger,” its eighth album. Three months into the sessions, Hetfield abruptly entered an intensive rehabilitation program, mostly for alcoholism, and then he dedicated himself to aftercare and family therapy. In total, Hetfield took eleven months off from Metallica. For a while, it seemed unlikely that the band would survive the hiatus. “There were six months where they were done, no question,” Rock said.
Cartoon by Harry Bliss
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When Hetfield finally returned, there were boundaries. He would work only from noon to 4 P.M., so that he could attend meetings and spend time with his children. His bandmates chafed against the new restrictions. With some nudging from Q-Prime, Metallica had been working with Phil Towle, a performance coach who functioned more like a therapist, and kept him on the payroll until it started to seem as though he wanted to join the band. Ulrich’s father arrived from Denmark to listen to some early songs. His reaction? “I would delete that.”
Metallica also still needed to find a permanent bassist. Robert Trujillo, a former member of the thrash-punk band Suicidal Tendencies, was invited to audition. Trujillo, who was born in Santa Monica in 1964, to a Mexican mother and a Native American and Spanish father, is thoughtful and serene. He wears his bass low and his long black hair in braids. When he performs with Metallica, he often creeps across the stage, seesawing from one leg to the other, a move that fans have dubbed the “crab walk.” His bass audition took place over two days. “The first day, I was just a fly on the wall. And then at about eleven o’clock at night Lars goes, ‘Hey, do you want to go get a drink?’ We end up drinking until five in the morning,” Trujillo told me. “People ask me, ‘Was there any hazing? Were you tested in any kind of way?’ I think that might have been part of it for him. At 9 A.M. he’s on the treadmill, and I’m there with this massive hangover.” That evening, Metallica offered Trujillo a place in the band. He was still wearing one of Ulrich’s Armani T-shirts from the night before. (Early the next year, they gave him a million-dollar signing bonus.)
In what might be the most fortuitous timing in the history of documentary film, the directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky had been in place to shoot the making of “St. Anger” for a goofy promotional gimmick—a series of late-night infomercials advertising the new record. Instead, they created a full-length film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” which was released in 2004. These days, big-budget music documentaries tend to be produced or even directed by the artists themselves, and to unfold in predictable ways: a little tension, a lot of comeback. But “Some Kind of Monster” shows Metallica, a band famous for being seemingly impervious even to the death of one of its members, at its clumsiest and most vulnerable. When I first saw the movie, I was twenty-four and found the incongruity of it—some guy in a sweater asking Metallica to talk about feelings—funny; now, at forty-two, I find it unbelievably poignant.
In the end, Metallica made a record with all the defeated energy of a sinking stone. “St. Anger” is airless, and lacks magic. (It also lacks guitar solos.) “Eh, it’s honest,” Hetfield told me, shrugging. “You might not identify with it, or you don’t like the sound. But that’s where we were, and that’s what we put out. It’ll have its time, maybe.” He laughed. “Maybe not!”
Somehow, Metallica managed to survive. “It was the four of us in a room with our instruments, looking at each other and going, ‘O.K., it starts again, right now, in this moment,’ ” Hammett said. The idea of moving on, and never looking back, has long been central to the band’s ethos. Though it would be strange to talk about Metallica’s music as hopeful or optimistic—it is not—the band has been propelled, in a nearly pathological way, by a kind of anti-nostalgia, a frenetic faith in whatever comes next. “The past just fucks things up—always,” Hetfield said to Rolling Stone in 1993. Ulrich told me that he contemplates the band’s history only when he’s being interviewed, and that even then it tends to assume an uncanny, almost mythic quality.
In 2007, the band hired Rick Rubin to produce its ninth studio album, “Death Magnetic,” and Rubin proposed a thought experiment to the members: What kind of record would they make if Metallica didn’t exist? “The weight of the title ‘Metallica’ is a heavy one,” Rubin told me. “What is the music you write if nobody has heard of you before?” To an extent, every Metallica record is a concept album about death—wanting it, fearing it—but none embraces dying quite as explicitly as “Death Magnetic.” The songs are fast, complex, ornery, and surprising. There are elaborate, harmonized guitar solos, rhythm changes, and lyrics that consider the delicate membrane separating the still living from the gone forever. “Just a Bullet Away,” an outtake, sees Hetfield again imagining, in a close and intimate way, what it might feel like to kill oneself. “All reflections look the same / In the shine of the midnight revolver,” he sings, his voice shuddering. If Hetfield saw his mother’s unwillingness to receive medical treatment as an inadvertent embrace of death, rather than as an expression of faith, it would make sense for his life’s work to interrogate that impulse. “There are times when I’m so afraid of dying,” Hetfield told me. “Other times, it’s, like, I’m good,” he said. “I feel cleaned up inside.”
In September, 2019, Hetfield returned to rehab, and the band cancelled a tour of Australia and New Zealand; five months later, Metallica pulled out of two American festivals, because, as Hetfield explained in a message to fans, “I have critical recovery events on those weekends that cannot be moved.” “It wasn’t a tune-up, that’s for sure,” Hetfield said of that stint in rehab. “It was me dropping the toolbox and saying, ‘I don’t need this. I’m tired of this.’ It was too much work being on the road and trying to stay connected with home. I was not caring for myself. I know that’s kind of the theme here—me not knowing how to take care of myself.”
The hammering title track of Metallica’s tenth album, “Hardwired . . . to Self-Destruct” (2016), grapples with whether it’s possible to thwart our most damaging tendencies. “On the way to paranoia / On the crooked borderline / On the way to great destroyer / Doom design,” Hetfield barks. His response to help is sometimes aggression. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he said. “I can identify what the problem is, easy. But what’s the solution?” He paused. “I don’t know if I want to hear the solution. I kind of want to still be stuck in my shit.” Earlier this year, Hetfield filed for divorce from Francesca Tomasi, his wife of twenty-five years. Hetfield continues to cite Tomasi as crucial to his early sobriety. “She was the one that threw me out of the house to go find help. I don’t want to call it tough love, because that’s cheapening it,” he said. “It couldn’t have been easy for her to say, ‘Get out.’ That affects her life, too.”
“Attention, passengers. Did you hear that really important update I just gave? You didn’t, did you? Well, I hope that podcast was worth it, because I won’t be saying it again.”Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz
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I asked Hetfield if, in the absence of drugs and alcohol, music might also offer a useful kind of oblivion. I’ve felt it, as a fan—the edges of my consciousness get a little blurry, maybe I forget where I am. He nodded. “There are many names for it. I call it getting in the zone,” he said. “You’re not feeling shameful about past stuff, you’re not future-tripping in fear about what’s coming up next. You’re right there, and you’re doing exactly what you need to do.” He went on, “I think everyone searches for that sense of presence. I searched for it in the wrong medicines for a long time. I just wanted to turn my head off. That worked until it didn’t work. Finding a new god that isn’t alcohol . . . yeah, that’s what I’m still workin’ on.”
This past spring, the San Francisco Giants hosted Metallica Night at Oracle Park. Hetfield and Hammett were scheduled to perform an instrumental version of the national anthem on their guitars, and Hetfield would throw out the first pitch. The day before, they convened at what Metallica calls HQ—an inconspicuous, semi-industrial complex in San Rafael. It contains the band’s administrative offices, a studio, conference rooms, and a cavernous practice space decorated with hand-painted flags from around the world and other fan-made ephemera. Hetfield and Hammett ran through the anthem a few times. There was some messing around. There were some big riffs. In their hands, the anthem became burly, lawless, and tough.
The following afternoon, Hetfield warmed up outside the park with one of the band’s physical therapists. He was throwing hard. “Better to go too far than to have it bloop-bloop-bloop to the plate,” Hetfield said. Earlier, in the greenroom, he had watched a video of Mariah Carey’s infamous first pitch at the Tokyo Dome, in 2008, in which she spectacularly whiffed it wearing four-inch platform heels, big sunglasses, and short shorts. “This seems much harder to do in hot pants,” he said.
I asked Hetfield if he was more nervous about the pitch than about the anthem. “Oh, yeah,” he said. Football is more his game. Hetfield grew up rooting for the Oakland Raiders, before the team moved to Las Vegas, and he said that playing the Raiders’ new stadium in Vegas had been “a big deal.” He met the quarterback Derek Carr that night after sound check. “He’s a super-spiritual guy, and I connected right away with that,” he said. “I was a total dork, like, ‘Derek, this is gonna be weird, but can I get your phone number?’ I never ask anyone for that. We text back and forth.”
When it was time to run through the anthem, which would take place near the pitcher’s mound, a security guard—older, testy—stopped Hetfield. “I gotta scan ya,” he barked, reaching for Hetfield’s credential. “You gotta scan me?” Hetfield laughed, with the incredulity of someone who has not been stopped by a security guard in several decades. “I gotta scan ya,” the guy repeated, unmoved. On the field, players—including the outfielders Mike Yastrzemski and Joc Pederson—lined up to pay their respects. Alex Wood, a pitcher, appeared holding a Sharpie and a bottle of Blackened whiskey that he keeps in his locker.
After sound check, Hammett and I sat high in the empty stands, overlooking the bay. The sky was wide and cloudless. “This area here used to be filled with run-down warehouses and factories from the forties,” Hammett said, pointing across the water. “After school, me and my friends, still in our Catholic-school uniforms, used to prowl around down here and throw rocks. All the windows were already broken out, but we’d try to get the last shards of glass.”
Since joining Metallica, Hammett has had to find a way to survive in a band led by two alpha males. “If you’re a lead guitarist of that kind of talent, the idea that you’d be third when people are listing band members—most people could not live with that,” Burnstein, of Q-Prime, told me. “But Kirk is a pure player. He lives to play.” Hammett, who is Buddhist, will talk at length about consciousness, God, enlightenment, resonance, Nirvana. He believes that the work he does with Metallica is an extension of some sublime and omnipotent creative force. “I put myself in this space where I take in all the creativity around me and I channel it to create more,” he said. His hope is that Metallica facilitates a healing sort of fellowship. “We are so nondenominational,” he said, laughing. “Come to the Church of Metallica. You’ll become a member and rejoice! You don’t have to direct anything at us. You can direct it at the experience that you’re having.”
That evening, Hetfield and Hammett shredded their way through the anthem. Afterward, Hetfield handed off his guitar and strode toward the pitcher’s mound. The throw was good. Strong, assured, unwavering. Straight across the plate.
In July, the Netflix series “Stranger Things”—which follows a group of rangy, anxious teens as they attempt to save their home town from a spooky alternative dimension known as the Upside Down—débuted the second part of its fourth season. The show is the platform’s most watched original series. The main protagonists are devotees of Dungeons & Dragons and members of something called the Hellfire Club, which is led by a sweet metalhead named Eddie Munson. In the season finale, Munson, who preaches nonconformity as a kind of sanctifying practice, volunteers—spoiler alert!—to sacrifice himself, and does so while standing on the roof of a trailer in the Upside Down, playing the guitar solo from the song “Master of Puppets.” (The season is set in 1986.) Two weeks after the episode was released, “Master of Puppets,” which is more than eight minutes long, appeared on the Hot 100 for the first time, at No. 40. (The show gave a similar boost to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” which came out in 1985.) “Master of Puppets” entered the Top Ten on Spotify’s U.S. chart, and the Top Fifty on its global chart; soon, it had been streamed more than half a billion times.
Unsurprisingly, older Metallica fans found the attention annoying. It’s easy to forget that, in the mid-eighties, publicly identifying as a Metallica fan often meant being labelled a druggie, a weirdo, a creep; back then, a person suffered socially for an allegiance to thrash. The idea that true metal fandom requires weathering such stigma is foundational and long-standing. Yet the band was quick to embrace its new acolytes. Metallica’s members even filmed themselves wearing Hellfire Club T-shirts and jamming along to footage of Munson’s solo. In a pinned comment on its official TikTok, the band clarified its open-door policy: “FYI—EVERYONE is welcome in the Metallica Family. Whether you’ve been a fan for 40 hours or 40 years.” Well, fine. The solo was recorded for the show by Tye Trujillo, Robert Trujillo’s eighteen-year-old son. The hope was that it would sound raw and frenetic, as though a teen-ager were playing it. “I don’t think Tye fully understood how this thing was gonna blossom,” Trujillo told me. “I liked that. At our house, we don’t have a whole lot of TV going all the time. We live in Topanga Canyon, and there’s a lot of time to play music and make art and go hiking and surfing. In some ways, he’s sheltered from the energy around these kinds of things. There’s a purity there, which I love.”
“The time has come for you to all compliment my cooking.”Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski
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In late July, Metallica headlined Lollapalooza, in Chicago—its first U.S. date since the “Stranger Things” finale aired. When the band first played the festival, in 1996, the booking angered Perry Farrell, Lollapalooza’s co-founder and the front man of the alt-rock band Jane’s Addiction. “A lot of people were pissed,” Burnstein told me. “I understand how Perry felt—like his alternative thing was being co-opted.” He added, “Of course, there was Perry last night backstage, saying hi to the guys.” These days, Lollapalooza is mostly indistinguishable from any other major American music festival. The weekend’s other headliners included the pop star Dua Lipa, the rapper J. Cole, and the pop-punk band Green Day. In the wake of “Stranger Things,” Metallica was now the most newsworthy act on the bill.
The night before the show, the band met in Grant Park to film a short skit with Joseph Quinn, the twenty-nine-year-old British actor who plays Munson. “You’re taller than on the TV,” Hetfield joked, shaking Quinn’s hand. The band took Quinn into its tuning trailer to jam. “I’ll give you a four count,” Ulrich said, drumsticks aloft. Quinn left with a signed guitar; the video was posted to the band’s social-media accounts. Afterward, the band went onstage to rehearse. It had rained earlier in the day, and the ground was slick with mud. I stood on a piece of plywood in a mostly empty field and watched Metallica warm up.
Hetfield has evolved into a magnetic front man. Early on, he said, his stage persona—cocky, aggressive, hard—was mostly aspirational. “Being up onstage is a fantasy world,” he said. “Everyone is out there sprinkling you with wonderful dust. You start to believe it, and then you get home and you go, ‘Where’s my dust?’ ” he said. “Not so wonderful now, sitting here alone with two cats, taking the garbage out.” On tour, he said, the days off are harder than the days on. There’s nowhere to funnel the energy; time turns into a strange, liminal expanse. “My body is tired, but my mind is still going. What do I do with that?” he said. “I just ask people in the crew, or friends, or my assistant, ‘Hey, can you just sit down and watch TV with me?’ ” “Moth Into Flame,” a song from “Hardwired . . . to Self Destruct,” is about the intoxication of celebrity. “I believe the addiction to fame is a real thing,” Hetfield said. “I’ve got my little recovery posse on the road to help me out. We’ll say a prayer before going onstage: ‘James, you’re a human being. You’re going to die. You’re here doing service. You’re doing the best you can.’ That is helpful for me.”
The following afternoon, the park filled with thousands of Metallica shirts, many of which looked conspicuously new. The atmosphere backstage was relaxed. I sat on a wicker couch with Robert Trujillo and drank a brand of canned water called Liquid Death. One of the group’s trailers was labelled “Yoga.” Shortly before Metallica’s set, I climbed a riser on the edge of the stage so that I could see both the band and the crowd. Festival sets can be hard—much of the audience had been bobbing in the late-July sun for nine hours by the time Metallica took the stage—but the energy was high. “Master of Puppets” has been a fixture on the band’s set list for decades, but now it’s been granted extra prominence as the final song of the encore. As Hammett began to play the solo, footage of Eddie Munson appeared on huge screens flanking the stage. The crowd went nuts. I clung to the edge of the riser. For a moment, it felt as though all of Chicago were shaking.
After Metallica’s set, Ulrich rushed off to the Metro, a rock club near Wrigley Field. His two oldest sons—Myles and Layne—play in an excellent bass-and-drums duo called Taipei Houston, and had a gig opening for the British band Idles. “That was the past, this is the future!” Ulrich joked, sprinting toward a waiting S.U.V. wearing a navy-blue bathrobe with the hood up. At the Metro, he stood in the V.I.P. balcony, glowing with pride. After the set, as Myles and Layne dutifully broke down their gear, Ulrich chatted with the club’s owner, Joe Shanahan, about the first time Metallica played the Metro, in August of 1983, opening for the metal band Raven. Ulrich was nineteen.
Later, over tea at his hotel, I asked Ulrich about the “Stranger Things” phenomenon. He leaned back, sanguine: “If you and I were sitting here twenty years ago, thirty years ago, back then it was really only about the music. Partaking in these sorts of opportunities would have been considered selling out. But the culture is so much more forgiving of these types of things now.” He continued, “When you’ve been around as long as we have, you have to kind of ebb and flow. I don’t think there were any writeups about Lollapalooza this morning that didn’t mention Eddie, didn’t mention ‘Stranger Things.’ And it’s not like ‘Eh, what the fuck, is the music not good enough?’ It’s like . . . it’s cool.”
In 2021, the band released “The Metallica Blacklist,” a collection of fifty-three covers of songs from the Black Album, in honor of the record’s thirtieth anniversary. Twelve of the fifty-three artists chose to cover “Nothing Else Matters,” which Hetfield wrote when the band was on tour in support of “. . . And Justice for All.” Elton John once compared “Nothing Else Matters” (favorably) to “Greensleeves.” It is, by my accounting, Metallica’s first song about romantic love. Hetfield can be coy about its origins—he missed his girlfriend; he found that feeling embarrassing—but it is also true that, since its initial release, “Nothing Else Matters” has come to sound less specifically romantic and more like an ode to any kind of life-sustaining devotion. It’s technically a waltz, but it feels like the last of the great power ballads: momentous, tortured, cathartic, triumphant. The Metallica community often talks about the track as a fan anthem of sorts. In moments of deep communion with the band and its music, nothing else matters. It’s an emotional song, but a terrifying one, too. “What’s heavier than love?” Scott Ian said.
This sort of vulnerability was once anathema to Metallica—“What I’ve felt, what I’ve known / Never shined through in what I’ve shown,” Hetfield sings on “The Unforgiven”—but it now feels central to the band’s mission. The singer and songwriter Kris Kristofferson, a longtime supporter, praised Metallica’s humanity and good will. “I’m a huge fan of their music, but even more so of the remarkable human beings they are,” he told me. “All heart.” In conversation, I found Hetfield warm and disarmingly open. He often inquired after my baby daughter. When I mentioned that I was having a hard time sleeping in my hotel room, he reminded me that it was important to have something from home. “My daughter gave me these stones—what are they called? Crystals,” he said. “You’ve gotta bring something. A pillowcase, some lavender oil.”
One afternoon, I asked Hetfield if he felt as though he’d finally found the life and community he’d always wanted: he lives in Colorado, hunting, beekeeping, spending time outdoors; he sees friends; he tours with Metallica. He paused to consider the question. “Will I ever admit that I found it? Will I ever allow myself to be happy enough to say I found it? Maybe that’s a lifelong quest, the search for family,” he said. “When my family disintegrated, early on in life, I found it in music, I found it in the band. I remember Lars being the first one to buy a house and have friends over, and I was, like, ‘Who are these people? You didn’t invite me! You’re cheating on me with another family!’ Obviously, our fans have become a kind of worldwide family. But at the end of the day they say they love you and you kind of go, ‘O.K. . . . what does that really mean?’ ”
But they do at least love a version of you, I ventured—the version of you that exists in the work.
“Yeah, and what version is that?” Hetfield countered.
It was a naïve thought, presuming that he could cloister or delineate a self in the context of a band he has led his entire adult life. “Metallica is bigger than the individual members,” Burnstein told me. “And to some extent, in their lives, they are subservient to the idea of Metallica.” That feeling of obligation has kept the band going, by giving shape to what its members have sacrificed. “The fifth member of Metallica is the collective,” Ulrich said. “People say, ‘What does Metallica mean to you?’ It’s just a fuckin’ . . . it’s a state of mind.” He paused. “Metallica is the whole energy of the universe. We just steer it along.” ♦
Freedom is Bad for Creativity
In 1957, Random House publisher Bennett Cerf made a wager with one of his authors. He bet Theodor Seuss Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss—that he couldn’t write a children’s book using 50 words or fewer.
An earlier book by Geisel, The Cat in the Hat, had employed an already-spare 236 words, selected from a list created by educators for children learning to read. Could the author write a book using only a fraction of that number? Geisel bet that he could.
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It wasn’t easy. “He really agonizes over this book,” relates Brian Jay Jones, Geisel’s biographer. “He ends up putting maps up on the wall of his vocabulary words, and he has flow charts—it’s a math problem for him part of the time.” Geisel prevailed over the challenge, and in 1960, Random House published the result: Green Eggs and Ham, a book that became a beloved classic.
This episode gave Catrinel Tromp, a psychologist at Rider University, the name for a theory she was developing about how the imposition of constraints can actually make us more creative. She called it the Green Eggs and Ham hypothesis.
Tromp’s theory goes against popular notions about how creativity is best achieved. Many of us assume that the ideal creative process is unstructured, open-ended, and free of external limitations.
But research by Tromp and many others finds that when we must work within constraints—imposed either by the task itself, or by us as creators—we come up with fresher, more original ideas. Why would this be?
When we face an ill-defined problem and a wide-open solution field—a blank page or an empty canvas—we reach for the associations that come first to mind; we gravitate toward the responses that have worked well for us before. That’s a prescription for clichés and familiar do-overs.
Constraints exert a forcing function: they make us look farther afield, for solutions that will satisfy a particular set of demands. The domains in which we search for those solutions are fewer in number, and so we search those domains more deeply. We tap knowledge that has previously gone unused; we re-organize and re-structure that knowledge; we come up with ingenious new associations and connections.
Research has found that the most creative people are especially adept at what psychologists call “constraint handling.” Here are five steps for handling constraints in ways that will make you more creative.
One: Start thinking about constraints early in the creative process. This turns on its head the usual practice, in which we give ourselves unlimited freedom at the outset and only bring in constraints (“this won’t work, and that won’t work”) when we’re judging our ideas toward the end. Research finds that constraints serve their forcing function most effectively when they are introduced and considered early on in the process.
Two: Evoke your constraints, and then write them down. Brainstorm a list of your constraints in the same way you would brainstorm new ideas. Write them down, and post them near the place where you’re working. The idea is make constraints as visible and conscious as possible, so that you know what you’re working with and around.
While writing this post, for example, I have to work within the following constraints—imposed by me, and by the nature of the genre: 1) It can’t be too long. 2) It has to be research-based. 3) It has to be accessible and not too wonky. 4) It has to be practical and useful. I was tacitly aware of these constraints when I sat down at my computer, but I find that it’s enormously helpful to articulate them explicitly.
**Three: Try to find the “sweet spot” of not too many constraints, and not too few. **Research suggests that we should formulate our creative project such that it is “moderately closed”—that is, structured to an extent that is useful, but not so hemmed in that we have no freedom to experiment.
Four: To achieve this ideal level of “constrainedness,” impose your own chosen constraints. Constraints come in two flavors: exclusionary constraints, and focusing constraints. Exclusionary constraints dictate: You can’t do this (e.g., don’t use any color, only black and white). Focusing constraints suggest: Train your attention on this domain more than others (e.g., explore in depth the many shades of blue). Some research suggests that focusing constraints are more helpful in facilitating creativity than exclusionary constraints.
**Five: Adopt a friendly, cooperative attitude toward the constraints on your creative project. **It’s possible to look at constraints not as limitsm but as tools—tools you employ to stake out new creative territory.
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Bonus: Try using chance to impose a constraint on the tendency to revert to well-practiced approaches. The twentieth-century composer John Cage used the I Ching, a Chinese divination tool, to “free himself from his tastes” and compose a piece of music that was utterly new and fresh. The result was Music of Changes, a work completed in 1951. Of course, it’s our taste—our particular sensibility as a creator—that makes a work distinctly ours. But when we’ve fallen into a rut of relying on familiar, well-practiced moves, mixing things up with an element of chance can inject our process with some needed novelty. Try choosing a word at random out of the dictionary to work into your next sentence, or try rolling a die to determine your next step. The author Paul Bowles was said to work incidents from his daily life into the plots of his novels—giving them the authentically accidental feel of real life.
How about you—have you found that constraints have helped you to be more creative?
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The Cognitive Biases That Hurt Our Relationships
I know you think this because everyone thinks this. The perception that we understand life in a way that nobody else does is an inherent facet of our psychology. That disconnect we feel is universal.
Here’s a factoid to ruin your Sunday morning breakfast: the human mind did not evolve to be good at understanding truth—the human mind evolved to be good at understanding what is most useful for the human mind. And spoiler alert: what is useful is usually not true.1
It turns out that we are not very objective in our beliefs. It turns out that our perceptions and reasoning are heavily influenced by cognitive biases.
Imagine that you’re looking at an image on a computer screen of a big party somewhere. Now, imagine that you tell the computer you want to believe that everyone with blonde hair is an asshole. And let’s say as if by magic, the computer’s algorithm gradually edits the image to make it look as though each blonde-haired person has a smug, condescending, highly-punchable look on their face.
Now, pretend you tell the computer screen you want to feel rich. Voila! The computer morphs the clothing and jewelry and hairstyles of everyone in the picture to look drab, cheap, and mundane.
Now, let’s say you tell the computer that this party, whatever it is, clearly sucks. And like a genie obeying your wishes, the party is quickly morphed into a stultifying, tepid affair. People appear to be slouched in corners, staring intently at their feet. Few conversations are happening and the ones that are seem forced.
This computer is not a computer at all. It is your subconscious. And like the computer, your subconscious alters what you perceive in highly predictable ways. Our moods color our experiences. Our identities steer our attention. Our self-interest dictates our interpretations.
So when we sit around and think, “If only people could see what I see to be true,” without knowing it, we mean that literally—people can’t see exactly what we see.
You and I can look at the same scene of the same party, yet our internal graphic design software alters it in completely different ways.
This graphic design software of our minds is what psychologists call “cognitive biases,” and we all have them. Below is a summary of some of the more prominent cognitive biases and how they affect our perceptions. Understanding these biases is important because they not only help us stop lying to ourselves, but they also help us empathize and understand the perspectives of others.
This list of biases is by no means exhaustive.2 But these are arguably the most common and important cognitive biases that we regularly fall victim to.
Table of Contents
- Confirmation Bias
- Negativity Bias
- Incentive-Caused Bias
- Actor-Observer Bias
- Group Attribution Bias
- Overcoming Cognitive Biases
Confirmation bias venn diagram
A diagram describing “loss aversion,” or the tendency to bias avoiding loss over achieving gains.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/PdFB7q89_3U?feature=oembed
The pinnacle of Dad fashion.
Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of the holocaust, on trial in Israel. Eichmann was not the evil anti-Semitic monster people expected, but rather a boring bureaucrat simply trying to impress the bosses.
Peanuts cartoon - cognitive bias
how taste gets made
When does taste begin? Where does it come from, why is it valuable? Do we, as humans, need it? I’ve been doing interviews about Can’t Even in anticipation of its release [NEXT TUESDAY, **PLEASE PRE-ORDER**] and I find myself returning to what happens when you turn yourself into a work robot: so many components of your life, your self, melt away. Or never get the chance to form in the first place: when you begin orienting your life towards college at a young age, then space for boredom, for failure, and for the development of taste seems to evaporate — or feel disposable.
I’m not talking about the development of so-called “good” taste: there’s a ton of writing on how our understanding of good/bad taste is indelibly linked to class performance, etc etc. (One of my recent favorites in this genre = Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s The Sum of Small Things). I’m talking about just knowing what you like and having a lot of room to like it. I’m talking about hanging out in that space and having time to continuously renovate it. I’m talking about pleasure, of course, but also self-definition: part of who I am is my love for these things, even if you think they’re bad.
And if you don’t have time to find things you love — or time, once you find them, to spend with them — there’s just something missing. This isn’t a contemporary thing, either. People can have taste in outdoor settings. In times of day. In bible verses. Taste is picking and choosing, harvesting and discarding, but finding out what speaks to you also means finding out who that you is in the first place.
My musical taste, like a lot of people’s musical tastes, was built on the foundation of my parents’: we always had music on in our house, and I figured out what I liked the most (Annie Lennox, The Cars, Fine Young Cannibals, Dire Straits, Prince) and what I didn’t (Billy Idol, I dunno, don’t be mad, taste is weird!) It was added to and textured by extensive exposure to radio (which played at the pool, where I spent basically every summer afternoon, and in the car; in 6th grade, a kid in my class started bringing his boom box on the bus and played En Vogue, which was very formative).
I didn’t start making huge taste choices until 7th grade, when I convinced my mom to let me get my own BMG 10-for-1 CD deal and started sneaking MTV. This was the early ‘90s, and MTV felt like an expansive cornucopia of cool, seamlessly alternating between Alternative and rap and inviting me to figure out what I liked the most (Smashing Pumpkins, Salt ‘n’ Pepa, Dr. Dre) and what I felt like I should like but didn’t as much (Soundgarden, Hole, R. Kelly). At the same time, even with my small CD collection, I spent hours trying to tape favorite songs off the radio.
I was also figuring out which music I liked but could never talk to my friends about (Tracy Chapman, Lyle Lovett), which music I could learn to like (the country music many of my friends listened to), and which “old” music I’d discovered on my own and had been scandalized that my parents didn’t actually like. I was obsessed with Simon & Garfunkel but my mom was dismissive: that was my brother’s music, she said. This was mind boggling and revelatory to me! That a person could not like the famous music associated with their “era”!
I went from buying CDs because I knew the single, which I would play on repeat, to buying CDs because I was obsessed with the artist, and would then listen to the album on repeat. I went to French immersion camp (another story!!!) and my counselors sang us to sleep with, uh, LADY music like Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos. I discovered the joy of going back and finding early work and the disappointment of a long-awaited sophomore album. I spent hours organizing my CDs, with their liner notes, in a CD binder. I knew what I liked and it was in a black Case Logic case that went everywhere I did.
I grew up in Idaho, where I was a cheerleader out of lack of other social infrastructure options. We traveled to away games several times a week, and after we gossiped or did our homework, we all listened to our Discmans for the length of our four to six hour round trips. I listened to music while doing homework, while driving to school (I got my license when I was 15; again, Idaho), while staring into space, while falling asleep, while waiting for the dial-up internet to work, while thinking about boys, while talking on the phone, while reading, and while, again, staring into space. This music wasn’t just my background, though — I feel it’s essential to make that clear. It was the foreground, the thread that helped the rest of my life make sense, helped me make sense to myself.
I know this is a very TEENAGE WAY to talk about music and the cultivation of taste. And some people are able to carry that way through the rest of their lives. I managed to hold onto it into my early 30s: even as my music expanded onto Napster and burned CDs, the CDs were still the thing, and they stayed that way because 1) I still lugged around the 50 disc CD player I had received as a high school graduation present and 2) I still used the Discman tape adapter to listen to music in my 1999 Toyota Corolla.
But then, in 2011, I made a big cross-country move and got rid of the 50-disc player, and the next time I moved I got rid of the CDs. I got an iPhone that plugged into the adapter. My mix CDs, my playlists, my accumulation of early adult taste — they became part of the “deleted years.”
As Dave Holmes wrote in *Esquire *last year:
I can tell you my favorite music from 1987, because I still have my Replacements, George Michael, and Tommy Keene records. I know my favorite music from 1997, because I’m hoarding CD booklets overstuffed with post-Oasis Britpop, Ben Folds Five, and Soul Coughing. I can call my favorite music from 2017 right up on my phone, because I make year-end playlists in both Apple Music and Spotify and post them on Twitter at Christmas (which I think we can agree is not the same as burning a CD).
Since I started using Spotify, back in 2012, I have playlists and memories of albums that I’ve discovered and loved. That’s what the playlist screenshotted on the top of this piece is: an attempt at recovering the Dad Songs I love, either because my own Dad introduced them to me or because of their generation (boomer) Dad-ness. I have songs I’ve starred from the algorithm-generated playlists that are supposed to approximate my taste. But they don’t, not really; they’re often times just covers of songs that I already like but, like, slowed down and sung by a Jason Mraz knock-off, or stuff that’s vaguely in the bucket of “sad sack” because I spent a month only listening to The National. But I haven’t felt like I’ve had space to be with music, old or new, in a long time. My taste, and even that self that has time for taste, has felt so distant.
Some of that shifted at the beginning of the pandemic, when Fiona Apple’s new album reacquainted me with some of that broad, immersive feeling of just hanging out with an album. Long car rides by myself do it as well. But those, too, are increasingly overtaken with podcasts — which are great, but are information. They lack the languorous, indulgent beauty of exhausting your voice from singing, without vanity, alone, for hours at a time.
I’m not trying to kids these days this conversation. Kids absolutely listen to music now. The radio lives, TikTok amplifies, YouTube videos have millions of streams. But personal taste requires time and space — which are so often occupied, from teenhood on, with transforming activities into resume lines, skills into hustles, pleasures into selling points. Taste can be performative and exclusionary but it can also just be a wellspring of self: recognizing that there is something there — something that is readily moved, something vital and inexplicable — apart from your capacity to work.
Do you miss music? Not just background music, but music that you really love? Do you miss your CD collection? Do you miss staring at the wall? Do you miss your lovely, weird, deeply familiar and ever expanding taste? Chances are high what you’re really missing is time with yourself — and time away from your identity as a worker or a parent.
Part of my larger project with this burnout book is granting us language to talk about all the ways we’re exhausted, and all the ways we got here. But part, too, is letting us see what we’ve lost of ourselves in our devotion to work — and how desperately we actually miss that part of ourselves, if only we gave ourselves the space to feel it.
Will actually listening to music and reacquainting yourself with your taste won’t fix burnout. I dunno, everyone’s fucking different. But if it mattered to you once, it’s worth thinking about how to make space so it — or whatever other thing felt like you — can matter to you again.
I WILL SHUT UP ABOUT THIS SOON, BUT BOOK PRE-ORDERS MATTER. **I make the case for why you should order now (instead of next week) in this thread**. It comes out 9/22, next Tuesday! I am a mashed up shell of myself trying to do all the interviews in anticipation, but I cannot **wait** for it to be out in the world and talk with actual readers about it.
As always, if you know someone who’d enjoy this sort of mishmash in their inbox, please forward it their way. If you’re able, think about going to the paid version of the newsletter — one of the perks is a weirdly fun/interesting/generative discussion thread, just for subscribers, every week, which is thus far still one of the good places on the internet. If you are a contingent worker or un- or under-employed, just email and I’ll give you a free subscription, no questions asked. If you’d like to underwrite one of those subscriptions, you can donate one here.
You can find a shareable version online here. You can follow me on Twitter here, and Instagram here. Feel free to comment below — and you can always reach me at annehelenpetersen@gmail.com. And if you really want, you can listen to that Only Dads Allowed playlist **here**.
The Curricula
Choose a subject to learn from our library of syllabi or create your own with our syllabus generator below.
The Stupid Classics Book Club - The Paris Review
In Elisa Gabbert’s column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general).
Vintage advertisement from 1972
Last fall, at a party, my husband and I and two friends decided to start a “Stupid Classics Book Club.” It began as a joke, and then struck us as a genuinely good idea. The project of this book club would be to read all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never did. None of us had been English majors, so we’d missed a lot. I pulled out a notebook, and we spent the next hour and a half in a corner, coming up with a list of “stupid classics.” As we went, we had to figure out exactly what we meant by “stupid”—we did not mean lacking in intelligence, or bad. For me, “stupid” meant relatively short, accessible enough to be on a high school syllabus, and probably rehashed into cliché over time by multiple film adaptations and Simpsons episodes. The quintessential example was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Anything too long or serious—Proust, Middlemarch—was excluded from the list, even if we all wanted to read it, due to failing those criteria. We did not assume any of the classics would actually be stupid.
We were wrong on that last count. The first book we chose to read was Fahrenheit 451. We’d all read some Ray Bradbury as kids, but not this one. A couple weeks later, when my friend Mike texted to say he had almost finished it, I texted back “No spoilers.” He responded with a semispoiler: “It’s … good for this book club.” I opened it up and read the first page:
It was a pleasure to burn.
I’m not always against laying it on thick, but I knew from the first sentence that I wasn’t going to like this. After thirty or forty pages, I texted Mike: “This book is so dumb it should be burned.” In the end, all four of us hated it. You might think the book’s central message (censorship is bad) is inherently noble, but nope: Bradbury wrote it in response to critics who had complained that his work was racist, sexist, xenophobic, et cetera. That motivation is present in the text, but just in case you missed it, Bradbury spelled it out in a coda to the book he wrote in 1979:
Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.
In Bradbury’s view of the universe, white men write good and important books, while “the minorities” and “women’s libbers” try to censor them. Except for one manic pixie dream girl who shakes Montag out of his complacency and is swiftly killed off (I missed her when she was gone), all the women in Fahrenheit 451 are zombie harpies. Montag eventually joins a band of men who have memorized the great books, the only way to save them from burning: “We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it’s here.” They are the heroes protecting the Western canon from being destroyed by cultural criticism. To be very clear, I don’t think we should burn or censor books, even ones I find morally repugnant. But my reasons are different from Bradbury’s (this, again, from the 1979 coda): “For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics.” And it’s not just the bad politics; it’s a sloppy, silly book. I commented to the group that it felt like a NaNoWriMo novel that had never been revised, and it basically was—Bradbury wrote the first draft as a short story in nine days, then expanded the story to novel length in another nine. We don’t have a fireplace, but after the book club met, we threw our cheap paperback copy in the trash.
For our next pick, the members of the SCBC all agreed we wanted something we knew would be good. We went with Frankenstein, which John had read before, but not in twenty years or so, so it seemed like fair game. I was amazed by how different the novel was from my received ideas about it. I had not expected the monster to be so articulate, or to have read The Sorrows of Young Werther (my reaction bordered on jealousy—I haven’t read that!). I could also never quite decide how to picture the monster. If I’ve seen a movie version of a book before I read it, I inevitably picture the actors from the movie; I saw and heard Anthony Hopkins in my head while reading The Remains of the Day, though I’ve never actually seen the movie, just the trailers. But I didn’t picture Boris Karloff or the boxy, bolted head of Halloween masks. Mary Shelley’s description of the creature didn’t match: “his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness.” Victor Frankenstein “had selected his features as beautiful”—but is appalled at the uncanny living result. Once it escapes, the monster bounds around the snowy Alps like a yeti, so I pictured something hirsute, like an Edward Gorey drawing, with perfectly round yellow eyes. The one thing I thought I knew, the monster’s physicality, I had gotten wrong. Almost everything about the book defied my expectations.
Our third selection was my definitive “stupid classic”: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. From the first sentence, I was delighted: “Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.” I laughed out loud; it’s like a better, funnier version of the not-beautiful-woman-who-is-still-somehow-beautiful trope. I loved the next sentence, too: “At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life.” Montag’s “symbolic helmet” is as terrible (I get that it’s a symbol, thanks) as “silent symbols of the after-dinner face” is great. I read on mostly for the prose, which is full of these anticlichés, these totally surprising phrases: one man is described as “about as emotional as a bagpipe” (I was not sure, at first, if this meant very emotional or not emotional at all); another as having “a kind of black, sneering coolness … but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan.” Two old friends are described as “thorough respecters of themselves and of each other.” A woman’s face betrays a “flash of odious joy.” I found the writing hilarious, appropriately full of contradictions, but also often beautiful:
It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-colored pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths.
I wrote to a friend at the time that I was enjoying the writing a lot, but didn’t really care about the story per se, the whole “devil inside” thing. This was before I got to the last twenty pages, the chapter titled “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case.” Up to that point, the plot had pretty much aligned with the version I’d absorbed through cultural references and cartoons: the doctor transforms into a smaller, uglier, more evil person after drinking a magic potion in his laboratory. In this changed form, he’s free to roam about doing his sinister deeds; he can always change back and be innocent again. In this last chapter, Jekyll explains why he began his experiments. From youth he’d been aware of “a profound duplicity of life.” He was “in no sense a hypocrite,” he says, doing good actions while thinking dark thoughts. Rather, “both sides” were real: “I was radically both.” As Mr. Hyde, he discovers, he can give himself over completely to darkness: “I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.” He is completely free as Hyde, he believes, and completely free of consequence: “Think of it—I did not even exist!”
Then comes a moment that stunned me: One night Jekyll turns in late and wakes in the morning with “odd sensations.” Nothing in his room looks amiss, yet “something still kept insisting that I was not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be.” He has the feeling that he should not be in his own room, with its “decent furniture and tall proportions,” all present and accounted for, but in the dingy “little room in Soho” where he sometimes sleeps as Hyde. The displacement is not in the room but in his body—he looks down and sees not the “large, firm, white and comely” hand of Jekyll but the “corded, knuckly, dusky” hand of Hyde. He has gone to bed good and woken evil.
Initially, Jekyll explains, the more difficult part of the transformation had been going from Jekyll to Hyde, but the more he transformed, the more this reversed: “I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.” Eventually, he can’t sleep at all without spontaneously converting: “if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened.” He cannot escape Hyde because Hyde no longer needs the potion, only Jekyll does, and Jekyll has run out of supplies. He is Hyde now, the evil “knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye.”
I had no inkling of this part of the story, which now seems to me infinitely richer and more complex than I’d imagined—it’s no longer simply about good versus evil, but rather any kind of unwanted or frightening change. I can read the final pages, which Jekyll narrates with the knowledge that it’s his last chance to “think his own thoughts or see his own face,” as a metaphor for aging or addiction or illness, the approach of death as a loss of the self—Jekyll’s last moments as the moments of lucidity when you recognize yourself as you are and remember the self that is disappearing, and can fathom the gap in between. The biographical note in my copy of Jekyll and Hyde tells me Robert Louis Stevenson died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of forty-four. I’ve read this part over and over: “The kindly author went down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of his favorite burgundy, uncorked it in the kitchen, abruptly cried out to his wife, What’s the matter with me, what is this strangeness, has my face changed?—and fell to the floor.” It was his last transformation.
“You think you know, but you have no idea.” That’s the catchphrase for an MTV show called Diary that I’ve seen exactly once. In that episode, we follow Lindsay Lohan around for a day to see what her life is (supposedly) really like. Every time it cuts back from commercial, we hear Lohan saying that catchphrase. I think it should be the tagline for Stupid Classics Book Club, too. I thought I knew, but I had no idea. It was trendy for a while to publish lists of classics that “you don’t have to read.” In 2018, GQ named twenty-one books, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,* Gulliver’s Travels, and the Bible, that “you don’t have to read,” with suggestions for what you should read instead. Lit Hub published a list of “10 Books to Read By Living Women (Instead of These 10 By Dead Men).” Since when is it poor form to die? I find these lists incredibly tiresome. Of course, you don’t *have to read anything. Some books will be triggering or make you deeply unhappy; there just isn’t enough time. But if you want to speak or write knowledgeably about them, you really do have to read them. You can’t just assume you know what they’re like. I’m glad I read Fahrenheit 451 even though I despised it. Now I know exactly how it’s bad, and I can hate it for the right reasons.
When I was younger, as a teenager and in my twenties, I often took for granted that “good art” was good—I was, if anything, overly trusting of authority—but I didn’t take the time to actually experience that art’s goodness for myself. The older I get, the more likely I am to think That’s underrated about stuff that’s completely established canon. (Sylvia Plath? Underrated! Led Zeppelin? Underrated!) It’s not that these artists don’t get enough attention; it’s more that when something good is widely appreciated, we take it less seriously. Popularity itself makes art feel like a joke; we assume if it’s famous, it must be obvious. In high school, I wasn’t impressed by the boys who owned Led Zeppelin albums (my friend Catherine might say they weren’t rising to the challenge of modernity), so I didn’t pay attention to Led Zeppelin. Now I listen to Led Zeppelin and think, Excuse me, this fucking rules.
On the first day of April this year, I felt an itch for some vernal ritual, some formal celebration of National Poetry Month and spring, though spring is my least favorite season. The Waste Land seemed just the thing, so I found a recording of T.S. Eliot reading the poem on YouTube and played it on a loop all morning like background music. It sounded so good, I opened the poem in a browser tab and vowed to keep it open all month, to dip into at random, whenever I wanted some gorgeous, contextless language. I first read The Waste Land in college, but I felt like I had never really read it—the way my instructors talked about it, I just assumed I wouldn’t understand it, so I didn’t bother trying. I’m sure they meant well, intending to prepare us for the difficulty, but instead they scared us off. I now feel lied to, like they just wanted to keep The Waste Land for themselves. The back of the copy I bought at my college bookstore pulls the same trick, deepening its aura of obscurity: “When The Waste Land was published in 1922, initial reaction to the poem was decidedly negative. Critics attacked the poem’s ‘kaleidoscopic’ design, and nearly everyone disagreed furiously about its meaning. The poem was even rumored to be a hoax.” Can a poem be a hoax? John Ashbery used to show his classes unlabeled poems by Ern Malley—the invention of two Australian writers who hated modernist poetry—and Geoffrey Hill—an actual modernist poet—and have them guess which one was the spoof. They were right about half the time, because, of course, they were only guessing. Ashbery liked the fake poems, which were designed to be confusing. But poems that are not a little confusing have no mystery. Maybe all good poems are a bit of a hoax.
When reading Shakespeare, you can be pretty sure that any familiar phrases originated with him. This isn’t quite so with The Waste Land. Many of Eliot’s lines are famous on their own, but the text is so allusive, you might recognize a line from its source material instead—take “hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frere!” (the last line of Eliot’s first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” and the last line of Baudelaire’s preface to Les Fleurs du mal). Another reference to Les Fleurs du mal in “The Burial of the Dead” is less obvious: line 60, “Unreal City.” Eliot’s line note is “Cf. Baudelaire: ‘Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves.’” It’s not quite a translation of the line, but more of a shorthand for it. Reading The Waste Land again recently, the phrase reminded me of something, but what? Not Baudelaire. Was it reminding me of itself, the first time I read it many years ago? No, it came to me—“unreal city” is a bit of a verse from an Okkervil River song called “Maine Island Lovers,” on an album released in 2003, which I listened to obsessively in grad school. Sometimes, lately, I get a glistening feeling that references, which are often, in any case, unintentional, are not one-way but reciprocal, that Eliot is referencing the Okkervil River song as much as the other way around. In the right mood, reading The Waste Land, I can feel unhooked from time, like Proust’s narrator of Swann’s Way dozing in his “magic” chair—the poem seems to allude both backward and forward, to reference the future.
This is why it’s worth reading the classics—to spend enough time with a text that a reference to it isn’t just outside you, but connected to your intimate, lived experience. You become part of the weave of the fabric.
Read earlier installments of *Mess with a Classic.*
Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of *The Word Pretty (Black Ocean).*
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The Memex Method – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
When your commonplace book is a public database
The complex, hand-wired backplane of an electromechanical supercomputer at the Computer History Museum boneyard; it is an impossible tangle of wires joining various subassemblies.
I’ve been a blogger for a little more than 20 years and in that time I’ve written a little more than 20 books: novels for adults; novels for teens; short story collections; essay collections; graphic novels for adults, highschoolers and middle-schoolers; a picture-book for small children, and book-length nonfiction on various subjects. I’ve written and delivered some hundreds of speeches as well, for several kinds of technical and non-technical audience, as well as for young kids and teens.
Over that same period, I’ve published many millions of words of work in the form of blog-posts. Far from competing with my “serious” writing time, blogging has enabled me to write an objectively large quantity of well-regarded, commercially and critically successful prose that has made many readers happy enough that they were moved to tell me about it — and to inspire some readers to rethink their careers and lives based on how my work made them feel.
There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.”
Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.
A commonplace book
Writers have kept notebooks since time immemorial. The auctorial equivalent to the artist’s sketchbook is the “commonplace book,” which can contain everything from newspaper clippings to grocery lists to attempts to capture those inspirational bolts out of the blue.
I’m sure that somewhere out there, there is a writer who is far more disciplined than I am, whose commonplace books are legible, carefully indexed, and comprehensive. My private notebooks are unreadable, disorganized messes, written with such appalling penmanship that it’s sometimes hard to be sure that they’re even written in English.
Thankfully, nearly my entire writing life has been digital. My computer scientist father introduced me to my first Apple ][+ in 1979, when I was eight years old, and I’ve been using digital systems to write, refine, and reference my writing ever since.
I have endless running text-files from the 1980s and 1990s in which I jotted down notes to myself. These are better than my actual notebooks in that they are searchable and I don’t have to decipher my handwriting, but I can’t really say that they generate much value for me as a writer. I couldn’t tell you the last time I referred to them. They are inert, more like logfiles than project-notes.
Web-log
Peter “peterme” Merholz coined the term “blog” as a playful contraction of “web-log” — like a ship’s log in which hardy adventurers upon the chaotic virtual seas could record their journeys. Though “blogs” have always been a broad church, there’s a kind of platonic ideal of a blog that’s right there in the term’s etymology: the blog as an annotated browser-history, like the traveler’s diaries my family kept on vacations, recording which hotels we stayed in and what they were like, where we dined and what we ate, which local attractions we visited and how we felt about them.
Like those family trip-logs, a web-log serves as more than an aide-memoire, a record that can be consulted at a later date. The very act of recording your actions and impressions is itself powerfully mnemonic, fixing the moment more durably in your memory so that it’s easier to recall in future, even if you never consult your notes.
The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them.
Writing for an audience keeps me honest.
Nucleation in a supersaturated solution
If you’re a writer or an activist or anyone else engaged in critical synthesis, then the news-stories, ideas, sights and sounds you encounter are liable to tug at your attention: this is a piece of something bigger, and maybe something important.
Every day, I load my giant folder of tabs; zip through my giant collection of RSS feeds; and answer my social telephones — primarily emails and Twitter mentions — and I open each promising fragment in its own tab to read and think about.
If the fragment seems significant, I’ll blog it: I’ll set out the context for why I think this seems important and then describe what it adds to the picture.
These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.
That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.
Be the first person to not do what no person has not done before
Clay Shirky has described the process of reading blogs as the inverse of reading traditional sources of news and opinion. In the traditional world, an editor selects (from among pitches from writers for things that might interest a readership), and then publishes (the selected pieces).
But for blog readers, the process is inverted: bloggers publish (everything that seems significant to them) and then readers *select *(which of those publications are worthy of their interests). There are advantages and disadvantages to both select-then-publish and publish-then-select, and while the latter may require more of the unrewarding work of deciding to ignore uninteresting writing, it also has more of the rewarding delight of discovering something that’s both totally unexpected and utterly wonderful.
That’s not the only inversion that blogging entails. When it comes to a (my) blogging method for writing longer, more synthetic work, the traditional relationship between research and writing is reversed. Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.
Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.
Memex
In 1945’s “As We May Think,” we encounter Vannevar Bush’s thought experiment of a “memory expander,” a machine that serves to organize its user’s thoughts and semi-automatically bring related ideas together to help the user synthesize disparate insights and facts into new, larger works.
The Memex has inspired bloggers since the earliest days of the form. Dori Smith called her pioneering blog her “backup brain”; the Observer’s tech longstanding columnist John Naughton has kept a blog for 19 years that he calls “Memex 1.1.” I called my blog my “outboard brain” back in 2002.
Though Bush’s inspired vision for digital augmentation of human thought was missing a crucial part ( publication of the notes, as a spur to note-taking rigor), it nevertheless hit on a vital aspect of digital note-taking: fulltext search and tag-based indexing.
Though I started blogging for Boing Boing on Pyra Labs’s Blogger tool, the format has always enjoyed a high degree of portability, making it easy to migrate to 6 Apart’s Movable Type and then to Automattic’s WordPress. When I left Boing Boing in early 2020, it was easy to export my tens of thousands of posts, spanning 19 years of writing, and import them into my own private WordPress site, which I called, simply, “Memex.”
Memex, combined with Pluralistic — the solo blog I started after I left Boing Boing — is a vast storehouse of nearly everything I found to be significant since 2001. When one of those nucleation events occurs, the full-text search and tag-based retrieval tools built into WordPress allow me to bring up everything I’ve ever written on the subject, both to refresh my memory as to the salient details and to provide webby links to expansions of related ideas.
Yesterday morning, I wrote a 1,500-word essay on web-blocking, free expression, copyright, and automated filtering, in the space of about an hour, between coffee and breakfast. The essay includes more than 20 references to articles from the past decade, some of which I wrote and some of which were written by others. It’s by no means the last word I’ll have to say on the subject (I’ve campaigned on this for more than a decade), but neither it is a mere repetition of what I’ve said before.
Rather, it represents the synthesis of recent events with a long run of earlier events, interventions, scandals and actions. Further, it represents the evolution of my ability to convey these complex and thorny ideas, based on the reception earlier pieces on the same subject received.
Change your priors
The availability of a deep, digital, searchable, published and public archive of my thoughts turns habits that would otherwise be time-wasters — or even harmful — into something valuable.
For example, it’s hard to write long and prolifically without cringing at the memory of some of your own work. After all, if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled.
Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial — it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.
For more than a decade, I’ve revisited “this day in history” from my own blogging archive, looking back one year, five years, ten years (and then, eventually, 15 years and 20 years). Every day, I roll back my blog archives to this day in years gone past, pull out the most interesting headlines and publish a quick blog post linking back to them.
This structured, daily work of looking back on where I’ve been is more valuable to helping me think about where I’m going than I can say.
A daily habit and a community
There’s another way that blogging makes my writing better: writing every day makes it easier to write every day. When I was a baby writer, I thought the injunction to “write every day” was purely aspirational, like “do an hour’s aerobic exercise” or “eat five helpings of vegetables.” I deeply regret the years in which I waited for inspiration to strike before writing (as I regret the years when I didn’t get adequate exercise or nutrition) because of all the practice I missed and the habits I waited too long to develop.
And while I never set out to blog in the hopes of “building a platform” (or, worse still, a brand), the act of publishing my own interests helped people with similar interests to mine to find me — and vice versa. Some of those people buy my books (and vice versa), but far more importantly, they are a community.
This is the final inversion of blogging: not just publishing before selecting, nor researching before knowing your subject — but producing to attract, rather than serve, an audience. Traditional editors identify an audience who will pay for their publication (or whom an advertiser will pay to reach) and then find a writer who can speak to that audience. As a blogger, I’ve enjoyed the delirious freedom to write exactly the publication I’d want to read, which then attracts other people who feel the same way.
Two decades in, I can safely say that this community of peers, mentors, sounding boards, protégés, friends, combatants and interlocutors is more useful to me as a writer and a person than the even the prodigious instrumental benefits that blogging brings to my composition process.
A process to process
Searching photo library by date
I’ve been taking a photo most every day for 20 years. While I strive to post these snapshots regularly, inevitably, chunks of time get skipped or days are so full that editorial choices must be made.
What began as a way to remind myself of topics to journal about turned into a routine that influenced the shape of my life.
Days vary greatly — they can be quiet or delightful, boring, incredibly full, and sometimes? Heavy.
In October 2023, my sister Robin passed away unexpectedly.
In those first days of grief I found myself overwhelmed. I spent hours trying to find photos of her.
I needed a process to process.
One morning, I decided to focus on today’s date and sift through decades of photos from the day. It was a lovely stroll down memory lane, unearthing gems that had gathered digital dust.
I did this again the following day, and the next… It provided a framework to grieve her loss and celebrate moments.
Now each day before I open email, look at social media or read the news, I have a coffee date with my sister’s spirit. I wake up earlier to make time for this ritual and look forward to seeing seasons unfold through the different phases of life.
It can be disarming to watch your life flash before your eyes in a manner of minutes, but I feel joy in the highlights and sturdier in anticipation of rough patches.
This process has turned being overwhelmed into a meditation of moments that expand. Whenever something good pops up I send images to friends and family. This often turns into a conversation and plans to reconnect proper.
I didn’t anticipate the fruit of grieving would bring so much love to loss.
I’m not sure what I’ll do when I cycle through the calendar (this ritual began Halloween of 2023), but I will continue to celebrate the process, reconnecting with folks and my sister’s spirit.
I’m always hoping to catch a new glimpse of her. (Those moments are extra good.)
A brother puts his sister’s hair in a braidMother and son by holiday spreadMy sister hams it up for the camera
Additional notes and links
- The last day I land on every morning is today’s date — the results are empty. I take a deep breath and spend a minute or so to think about what good can come of the day.
- I feel you don’t need twenty years of photos to make this process work. I think it’s about: a.) Carving out time and space to practice reflection — and b.) Engaging with the present and future in some manner.
- I’ve been posting unearthed snapshots on Threads along the way.
- Sometimes I’ll share longer memories from a photo under the category of Recollections
- I made a video of my process below (or this link if the embed is borked). It’s 20 minutes, but the first 3 cover the basics.
- On October 31, 2024 I completed looking back at every day of 20 years and wrote this letter to my sister. 🩵
What are your three rules?
What are your three rules?
It’s not just our tech enabled world that runs by algorithms. Us meat machines, us humans, we one and all have our own programming, our deeply embedded rules that determine the decisions we make, the paths we walk, and who and how we show up in the world.
The first part of growth and development is figuring out what our rules are. Finding language for our programming. The second part is often unbugging the program, and rewriting your maxims for the person you want to be, rather than the person you once were.
Here are three rules for you that I bet you haven’t considered … at least not fully:
- Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started
- Learn to take a punch
- The Ordinary + Extra Attention = The Extraordinary!
Each one of those is from a different Austin Kleon book.
‘Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started’ is #2 from his breakout hit, Steal Like An Artist.
‘Learn to take a punch’ is #8 from Show Your Work.
And, ‘The Ordinary + Extra Attention = The Extraordinary!’ is #5, in the third book of the trilogy, Keep Going.
Now I had thirty rules to pick from - each book has ten maxims - but I picked these three for you. Because I know one of them was just what you needed to hear.
And I’m curious … which one was the one that struck a chord?
The rule I like? ‘Creativity is subtraction.’ It’s from* Steal Like an Artist*. I cunningly removed that from the list of three, I offered you earlier on…
📕 My Guest: Austin Kleon
Austin is a New York Times bestselling author celebrated for his trilogy on creativity: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going, alongside Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poetry.
His innovative works, translated into dozens of languages with over a million copies sold worldwide, have earned acclaim from major publications and appearances on NPR, PBS, and more. Known for his insightful talks at prestigious venues like Pixar and Google, Austin’s diverse background includes roles as a librarian, web designer, and copywriter.
Residing in Austin, Texas with his family, he’s hailed as a leading voice on digital creativity. To learn more about Austin, visit www.austinkleon.com.
🎧 **The Hardest & Best Creative Question: A Conversation with Austin Kleon**
Austin reads two pages from What It Is by Lynda Barry.
In our conversation, we discuss:
- The Transformative Power of Creative Mentors
Austin’s encounter with Lynda Barry showcases how a brief moment can fuel a lifetime of creativity, illustrating the profound impact mentors have on our creative paths.
- The Interplay of Words and Images in Storytelling
Explore the delicate dance between the visual and the verbal, where Austin finds his voice. This synergy of words and pictures not only defines his unique approach to art and literature but also challenges us to reconsider the boundaries of storytelling.
- Cultivating a Creative Community
Austin’s journey through the digital landscape to find his tribe, reflecting on how the web serves as a conduit for connecting with like-minded souls. The importance of community in nurturing creativity and overcoming the solitude often found in the creative process.
- Embracing Simplicity and Play in Creativity
The significance of maintaining a playful approach to creativity, encouraging us to simplify our processes and embrace the joy in creation. A reminder to balance the seriousness of our work with the light-heartedness that sparks innovation.
- Navigating the Creative Process: From Doubt to Discovery
The journey from wrestling with self-doubt to embracing the freedom found in the act of making. Austin’s reflections on the questions that plague every creator—”Is this good? Does this suck?”—a candid look at the internal dialogue that drives the creative process forward.
Read the Interview
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How I Use Digital Sidekicks to Aid My Bujojitsu
Dog or Cat? Cake or Pie? Coffee or Tea? And our ultimate favorite: Digital or Analog? Most this-or-that don’t mix well. (Ever had Sushirrito?)
Luckily for us though, digital and analog systems can complement each other, and here’s how I use digital sidekicks to supplement my bujo practice.
THE BIG ‘WHY’
I am sure we all have different reasons why we want to incorporate digital tools into bujo practice, so let me share mine first.
My intention for using Bujo is to ensure that I spend my time and attention in ways that are aligned with my values. One of the most important ones to me is creativity.
To support this intention, I jot down many ideas, inspirations, illuminating insights, and lessons I learn from my experiences. However, I started to notice that some of these ideas just get hoarded in my Bujo because they don’t have proper channels to develop further or materialize. And this is why I use digital tools with my bujo, to bring my ideas to life.
The What
The main digital sidekicks I use:
- Bullet Journal Companion App for when I am on the go
- Google Calendar for managing my ever-changing appointments, events, and commitments
- Roam Research for making notes (elaborating on the notes I take on Bujo) and storing them for long term
- Notion for content creation and collaborative work with others
The way I use the Bullet Journal companion app and Google Calendar are pretty straightforward so let me skip to the juicy stuff: Notion and Roam Research.
♻️ Bujo, Roam, Notion
Here’s my favorite analogy for how I use these three in harmony. Capturing thoughts on Bujo is like planting seeds. I water them, weed them, and fertilize them through reflection and migration until they sprout. Roam works as a nursery where my tiny plants (ideas) can grow into larger trees and eventually (hopefully) a forest. And Notion is where I build cabins so that I can invite others to join me!
What is the difference between Notion and Roam?
Notion and Roam are both wildly versatile digital note-taking/project management software and the simplest way to describe the difference between the two would be this.** **Notion is linear and Roam is multidimensional.
Notion is an excellent tool for sorting information in a structured manner whereas Roam is a phenomenal vessel for connecting fragmented thoughts. Let’s say we have thoughts about Art, Buddhism, and Coffee. They remind you of one another so they are related in your mind, but they don’t really belong in the same ‘category’, so you are not quite sure how to manage them or even where to store them. Roam will mitigate this problem by automatically creating links within these related notes. So if you went to see note A, you will see B and C, linked in the same page. If you go to note B, you’ll see A and C, linked and so and so forth. This feature promotes organic growth within the thoughts we capture.
Networked notes on my Roam
The Why
Why Roam?
Bi-directional link feature and its resources
To my knowledge, Roam is one of the most (if not THE most) popular software that offers a bi-directional link feature. This is not my favorite philosophy to subscribe to, but I follow the crowd first when I want to try new tools because popularity yields more insights and resources such as tutorials and add-ons.
This is why I have been using Roam, but I think it’s a little bit of an overkill for what I want to use it for, so I am currently in the process of switching to Logseq which does essentially the same exact thing as Roam, but free for use.
Why Notion?
1. Intuitive user interface
Notion makes all the features and formatting really accessible even for people with very limited IT skills, like me. ( I still don’t really understand how iCloud works, tbh.) Everything can be rearranged by just clicking and dragging. This helps me move around notes and references as I work on a project. (I especially appreciate the multi-column layout on Notion! )
Page I used for YouTube video production
2. Seamless Collaboration
Sharing option is offered on other platforms like Google Document. What separates Notion from the rest, is its versatility. Imagine having Google Document, Spread Sheet and Google Slides all. ON. ONE. PAGE. This becomes highly efficient when I want to invite others to freely read and edit multiple materials.
Shared page for language lesson
3. Aesthetics
Some things are just more fun and inspirational with images. (If you are trying to brainstorm which color you want to use to paint your bedroom wall, you won’t endlessly write down the hex codes in your notebook. You’d hop on Pinterest, or go get color samples from The home depot, right? )
The super-easy image integration on Notion saves the day when I want some visual aids. For example, this is my vision board (a list of dreams with pictures) on Notion. I cherry-picked each item from my collection on bujo titled “Goals and Dreams”. This list on bujo was kind of monotonous and was just a little…Dry. So the colorful representation like this, helps me envision my aspirations more vividly.
The How
My rule of thumb is to always migrate information from Bujo to digital tools, never the other way around.
Any inspiration, ideas, thoughts, or insights, all get captured on my Bujo first. That being said, here are other beacons I use to navigate my decision-making in tool usage.
1. How I decide on digital or analog
Sometimes we try to hammer a nail with a banana because we just simply appreciate bananas and have so much faith in them. So much faith that we’d even try freezing bananas to see if they’ll work better for hammering. 🍌 I’ve had a fair share of this experience; picking the less-than-ideal tool for the job.
A great example would be my “Books To Read” collection. At the time, I was trying to confirm my identity as an avid reader, so I was tracking my reading habit on bujo. Therefore, I thought it was an excellent idea to keep the book collection on bujo, too. However, after a couple of notebooks (yes, it took me that long), I realized that 99% of my book purchase is done online. And 99% of my book discoveries are done online (social media and online book stores), as well! ( I now use Goodreads to save all the books I want to read. )
Since this revelation, I try to always ask myself “When do I want to stumble upon this idea? (Under what circumstance will I want to retrieve this information?)”when unsure of which tools to use.
My thought process would look like this:
- Content-creation-related information = I will most likely need it when I am planning and making content, which is done online, So it would make sense to store it on a digital tool.
- Information regarding my well-being = I would most likely want to retrieve it during my sacred time = when I am offline =* analog system* (bujo).
2. How I Practice Digital to Analog Migration
When: Sunday at 8
This is when all the magic happens, during weekly reflection. I do long-form journaling, then migrate underdeveloped yet exciting/promising ideas and insights from bujo to appropriate digital tools.
I tried doing this daily, but I decided weekly practice works better for me because
a) My daily reflection is a part of a decompressing process for me, so I don’t want to invite any distractions like digital devices and the internet in general.
b) I like to let my ideas simmer for a few days because sometimes I think “Wow!!! This is the best idea I’ve ever had in my entire life!!!” only to wake up to the realization the next morning, that I was just slightly intoxicated at that moment. So giving my thoughts and observations some time to take root, works really well for me.
What to migrate to where: Ideas to Notion, insights to Roam
To Notion
Most work-related ideas such as content ideas or teaching ideas, get migrated to Notion where I have idea pools for each category.
Screenshot of my idea pool
To Roam
Other “insights”, I migrate to Roam and during this process, I try to be especially selective of what I migrate.
Let’s take my daily log from last week for example.
Do I want to keep and expand on what I learned from an intriguing article? Absolutely! About the guy with a mohawk from local Denny’s? ….Not so much.
If/when I decide to migrate some notes, I elaborate on it a little bit on Roam. (=make notes.)
Note I made about the article I read
I used the note about the mohawk guy as an example of an entry to dismiss, but a lot of times, seemingly frivolous entries on my bujo actually spark interest and inspiration in me. So for instance, if I decided that seeing the mohawk guy at the local dinner really ‘sparked joy’ in me, I might make a note like this.
At the end of that day, what ‘sparks joy’ should be the driving force for the things I engage in, so to me, it’s really important to summon my inner-Marie Kondo upon migration. ✨
Parting Words
One of the common misconceptions is that we think we need an ultimate all-in-one tool. A magical power drill that somehow cooks dinner, too. Well, it’s just not going to happen. (Anytime soon anyways. Unless, of course, Mr. Elon Musk prevails..) So it’s okay to be in an open relationship with multiple tools!
Another thing that is worth remembering is that Bujo or Notion or Roam or whatever it may be, it is a tool for thought. And different tools encourage different ways of thinking, so when in doubt, we can always ask ourselves “In what ways do I want to be thinking?” “Will this remove the friction and serve my thinking?”
Okay, that’s it. I hope my not-at-all lengthy post was somewhat helpful! Please let me know if you have any questions about my process!
Sakuraco is a dedicated ESL instructor, content creator, and a passionate student of life. Watch her videos about bullet journaling, productivity, and learning tips from here. For weekly reflection prompts and Bullet Journaling tips, visit her Instagram.
Water in the well - Austin Kleon
“Find your own water,” 2016
Water is always on one’s mind in Texas. We are in a bad drought down here, but luckily, for me, for once, the drought is literal and not metaphorical.
Some Hemingway (from his Paris Review interview), courtesy of George Saunders:
Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are spent on the actual writing. A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.
And elsewhere:
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
Hemingway here is talking about subtraction — John McPhee talks about the addition:
If somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.
(All emphasis mine.)
Plumbing issues are usually matters of input and output.
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: Ernest hemingway, john mcphee, NOTES ON WRITING AND DRAWING, routine, water
What to Do if You’re Not a Naturally Tenacious Person
Post image for What to Do if You’re Not a Naturally Tenacious Person
Throughout my life, when faced with adversity, I’ve often wanted to magically become either a cat or an Olympic athlete.
Cats are enviable because they’re immune to worry and striving, and feel no pressure to accomplish long-term projects. They are completely satisfied to bask in a square of sunlight on the carpet, or squat on a dresser like a Zen chicken, blinking slowly and indifferently. It would be nice to have such a close alignment between one’s natural desires and one’s capabilities.
I’ve envied athletes for similar reasons, although they approach life very differently than cats do. Top athletes have clear goals and a kind of inner drive that seems able to move them through vast amounts of pain and difficulty. On some level they must want to get up at 5:00am to throw medicine balls against a wall. They want to run or ski or pommel-horse until their bodies – not their minds – threaten to quit on them, if that’s the cost of a shot at a gold medal.
I’ve never wanted a gold medal, but I’ve always wanted whatever quality it is that makes people want gold medals – or anything — that badly.
Wanting to Want
Whenever interviewers ask an athlete how they endure training in the searing heat, or how they bounced back from a torn ligament last year, they always say, “You just have to want it bad enough.”
The follow-up question they never ask is, “How do you get yourself to want it bad enough?” I assume the athlete would shrug and say they don’t know, they just do. Whether a goal attracts you strongly enough to incentivize pushing through every obstacle seems more like a function of luck – some natural attunement to the goal, or some inherited trait – something you happen to be rather than something you choose.
Naturally attuned to his goals
I believe I was born with an unusually strong desire to eat sugary treats, for example. This desire has driven me to cross the city solely to obtain a certain Ben & Jerry’s flavor from a certain grocery store before it closes, and to eat it at 9:50pm even though I know it will give me horrible dreams about losing my teeth or my passport. I don’t have to drum up the desire to seek this ice cream, or to endure any costs and consequences it entails. The drive is intrinsic.
Meanwhile, psychologists tell me that my brain’s natural reward system is underactive, meaning that the prospect of conquering challenges and solving problems does not generate the same amount of motivating reward-juice it does for the average person. (It is also not uncommon with ADHD, they tell me, to react to that deficiency with dopaminergic vices like eating entire pints of ice cream.)
That’s not the end of the world because I do have other talents and advantages. For one thing, I’m pretty good at appreciating life’s ordinary moments (although I have had to work at that). I wouldn’t trade places with the billionaire who can’t set aside his desire to earn more money long enough to enjoy a week-long vacation with his family. But I sure do wish I was dealt a bit more of that trait we sometimes call drive or tenacity – the inclination to push through discomfort and adversity to the rewards beyond.
Appear to want something
The gold medalists and billionaires among you may not understand this particular conundrum. I’m sure some of you can relate, though. What do you do if you’re not a naturally tenacious person? How do you become tenacious?
“You just have to want it enough” is a common refrain but isn’t useful advice, and in fact isn’t advice at all, unless you’re able to control how much you want things. Essentially it’s another way of saying, “You have to be someone else, sorry.” If sufficient desire is there, it’s there, and if it’s not, it’s not. The discus thrower who wants nothing more than the time to throw discuses all night is in some sense lucky (or unlucky) to want that.
The Two Rewards
Recently I had an insight that might help you if you’ve always felt a similar deficit in the drive or desire to overcome challenges.
I was journaling about the conundrum of self-motivation when I found myself having typed the line, “One thing I do desire strongly is the feeling of relief I get after giving up on a tough problem.” I have never exactly realized this, but I love giving up. I love giving up like I love ice cream. As long as I feel like I can somehow get away with it, I can’t wait for that moment of releasing all effort and expectation, of unshouldering the heavy bag of grain onto the floor, of clapping the laptop closed and saying fuck it.
Looking back, I’ve been seeking this specific form of surrender-induced relief as long as I can remember, perhaps similarly to how Serena Williams seeks the feeling of winning tournaments and hoisting trophies.
Giving up, at least for the day, has always felt like salvation, a moment of release from the awfulness of having to do things you don’t know how you’re going to do. In my case this is undoubtedly a developmental side-effect of coping with undiagnosed ADHD for thirty-some years. Many of my memories of being a student or an employee were of being charged with an ordinary task that confounded me completely, and which most people around me could just do with no visible agony or trepidation. Escaping or delaying the task (while minimizing the fallout) often seemed like best achievable outcome, and I got very good at that.
An old friend
In other words, instead of learning to seek, as many people do, the glorious feeling of solving and surmounting problems, I learned to seek a related but different glorious feeling: the feeling of escaping having to do it.
Escaping vs Surmounting
These two rewarding feelings — that of escaping the burden, and that of overcoming it — are cousins, each a result of a certain shift in the effort applied to a stubborn task.
This “unshouldering the burden” feeling, the giving up feeling, comes from dropping the effort applied to the problem. You stop and surrender, releasing all mental and muscular tension, accepting that you are not solving this thing, not today anyway.
The “overcoming/surmounting” feeling comes from seeing the task beginning to break down as a result of effort – the exhilarating sensation of the knot finally loosening or the wall beginning to topple. It often comes after pushing harder than usual, trying several different angles, or drawing creatively on your resources, rejecting all scenarios in which you don’t solve the issue.
Unshouldering the burden
Both of these competing glorious feelings – escaping and surmounting — are known to all of us. Some of us, for whatever reason – learning disabilities, bad luck, bad mentors — have developed a much stronger taste for the former. Our routines, even our personalities, have become attuned to the escape feeling. Our hearts have ached for it and our expectations have been built around it.
For the chronic escaper, realizing the relationship between these opposing feelings creates an opportunity for recovery. The new game, as I understand it, is to stay as aware as possible of your fondness for the bliss of surrender, letting it remind you of the other, less familiar glorious feeling that is also available. You can begin to consciously develop a taste for surmounting, while consciously reducing how often you indulge in the escaping feeling.
What we need to remember is that both of these rewarding feelings are available at the *exact same moments. *Any instance in which you’re tempted by the dropping-the-sack feeling, you could instead go for the toppling-the-wall feeling. They both feel good, but one makes the future better and one makes it worse.
Always an option
This new taste for surmounting can be developed in small bits; you don’t have to throw yourself into a PhD program or sign up for an ultramarathon. For example, when I look at the clock and see there’s only eight minutes left until quitting time, I’m tempted to drop the grain-sack right there and begin thumbing through my phone, because it’s only eight minutes so who cares. But even this innocent move reinforces the taste for escape, for the backing off of effort. A small taste of surmounting is available in its place – I can instead dial up the effort for that last eight minutes, and knock off some small task I’d otherwise have to do tomorrow.
(This, in hindsight, is why a certain method of working has been so powerful for me.)
More importantly, these small reversals make me a little less inclined to unshoulder the grain-sack at the first opportunity. The taste of surmounting likewise becomes a little more appealing. The reward centers get a little more used to that taste, and more likely to drive me towards it in the future.
I believe this is the way for the self-motivation hard-cases among us: to gently but steadily tip the balance towards a taste for surmounting, by ramping up effort in precisely the places where we feel a craving to dial it back.
This process is what I now think of as tenacity. Even the word itself tastes good.
- **
Photos by Graham Covington, Michael Sum, Jon Chng, Andrew Teoh, Simon Maage, Eduardo Flores, Leonardo Sanches, and **Masaki Komori
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A Guide to Being in Action - Zen Habits Website
I have a couple of clients who’ve been stuck in inaction for months now, and they’re desperate to get into action.
So we’ve set up structure and training so they can train themselves to be in action much more of the time.
It’s trainable, if you’re willing to commit yourself.
In this short guide, I’ll talk about how to train.
Commit to Possibility
When we are not feeling motivated to take action, and we’re feeling burdened or bleh about a task … it’s because we aren’t connected to some possibility in our lives.
What is it that you want to create in the world? What do you want to change in your life, or in the lives of others?
If you get clear on that possibility, and feel connected to it, you’re going to feel much more energized and inspired to tackle your tasks.
Some examples of possibility:
-
Create an income with my new business to support me and my family
-
Help people overcome their feelings of inadequacy
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Help my team feel more energized and connected to meaning
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Help keep my family safe and happy
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Help 100 million people change their lives with uncertainty training (my mission)
There are lots of other possibilities, but the important thing is to connect to yours, before you even take on a task. And reconnect when you’re feeling like not doing it.
Then commit to creating that possibility, even if it feels difficult or scary.
Create Daily Structure
Once you’re connected and committed to that possibility, it’s important to have some structure. Some examples:
-
A schedule with blocks for your meaningful tasks
-
Accountability with a group of people
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A session at 10am every day where you write for an hour
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A video call every day at 8am with an accountability partner, where you do 2 hours of focused work on the call together
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A commitment to check in with a coach, and a consequence for not doing your commitment
What structure will help you be in action? Create it for yourself, and then train.
Train Your Action Muscle
This is the important part: you can connect to possibility and be committed, create a structure … but then you have to actually put it into action. Nothing else matters but this.
So train yourself for a week, and each day be in action. Be doing stuff. Get shit done.
Take on the hard tasks, in small chunks. Check things off your list, while feeling the meaning and possibility you’re creating.
Be in action, over and over, and you’ll train the action muscle.
After a week, review: how did it go? What needs to be adjusted? What did you learn? How can you keep the training going?
So with this in mind: what would you like to commit to today?
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The Best Way to Resolve Your Shame
This feeling is what psychologists call “shame,” and we all have it to some degree.1 Deep inside each of us, there is some unsavory part of ourselves that we camouflage from the world and pretend is not there.
Shame can fuck us up. Feelings of shame are associated with all sorts of awful stuff like depression, uncontrollable anger and hostility,2 poor physical health,3 and being a narcissistic asshole.4
It’s for this reason that shame has become a sort of boogeyman in the self-help world. Expose your shame. Eliminate your shame. Liberate your shame. Invite your shame to junior prom and dance with it to some sweet, soft Barry Manilow tunes.
John Bradshaw popularized the evils of shame in his 1988 self-help classic, Healing the Shame that Binds You.5 Since then, many other researchers and self-help authors have picked up the shame-obliteration mantle, most notably Brené Brown, who points to shame for “our inability to change,”6 and Deepak Chopra, who has weird pseudo-scientific theories about shame, inflammation, and a “falsely colored reality” or something.7
And so the key to the promised land of super-awesome love and totally rad happiness, we’re told, is to eradicate shame and guilt from our lives, to blast it out of our psyche with a proverbial bazooka—usually involving some sort of hug circle or a really, really expensive seminar.
Some thinkers even go so far as to say that shame isn’t “real”—that it’s invented by society or religion or your super-evil parents to, as the filmmaker Blake Edwards puts it, “exploit the human race.” Or even if it’s not exploiting you somehow, it is, as Anaïs Nin said, “a lie someone told you about yourself.”
The overriding point here is that shame is like, really, really bad. And we should get rid of it. All of it. Every last ounce of it!
Okay… stop the train.
While it’s pretty clear that most of us struggle with shame and guilt, I think we took the shame train a little too far into Woo-Wooville and I’d like to back us up a few stops, re-evaluate why we feel shame in the first place, and maybe come to some more nuanced conclusions about why so many of us often feel like a bag of dog turds and what we can do about it.
Table of Contents
- Feeling Shame and Guilt
- The Glue of Civilization
- The Paradox of Shame and Guilt
- Shame and Narcissism
- Dealing With Shame and Guilt
Don’t make fun of me—they’re all I have in this world.
Feelings Wheel
The root of my childhood shame.
Person with head against the wall outside
Sad man sitting by wall
There’s no therapy like quesadilla therapy.
The Biggest Waste of Time in Life | Your Next Breakthrough
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89 people had breakthroughs this week. Will the next one be you?
Two things for you to think about
The second biggest waste of time is to try helping someone who asked for help but doesn’t actually want it.
The biggest is to be that person who asked.
The person who asks for help and doesn’t want it, and the person who gives it even though it isn’t wanted, both want the same thing: to feel seen.
Reflect: Then consider sharing this thought with others.
Three things for you to ask yourself
Do you really want help or do you want attention and validation? Do you really want to help or do you also want attention and validation?
How much more time are you willing to waste?
Recommended: Use these as journaling prompts for the week.
Two things for you to try this week
Stop wasting time on people who don’t actually want it. Stop wasting time waiting for someone to give you what you don’t want to receive.
Remember: Small changes lead to lasting breakthroughs. Reply to this email and let me know how it went for you.
New This Week
My Advice for If You’re at Rock Bottom – Our greatest transformations often come from our worst moments. This quick video talks about the lesser-known research behind trauma and how our pain can become some of our most unexpected sources of strength. Check it out.
The Unsettling Truth About Self-Discipline (ft. Rich Roll) – I’ve often wondered if self-discipline is just a way of turning bad addictions into healthy ones. There’s no one better to talk about this with than Rich Roll, former ultra-endurance athlete, recovered addict, author, and podcaster.
We talk about the value of pain as a catalyst for change, the idea that addiction is a spectrum that doesn’t just involve substances, terrible breakups, finding a deeper spirituality, lessons from Rich’s financial struggles, his career running a top podcast, and much, much more. Check it out.
Last week’s breakthroughs
In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about how the only failure in life is to never fail. For if you never fail, you never learn. I then asked you to go fail spectacularly.
For Kirsty, it was her repeated failures that eventually brought success:
At the ripe old age of 49, I decided that I didn’t want to spend the next 18 years until retirement working in my current field. I had no clue what to do instead, but ended up looking into coding.
Elli unexpectedly failed at work, and the outcome surprised her:
I was thrown into a project at work I had absolutely no idea of. I know how to do my job which is completely different but I thought ‘I always figured things out, so I’ll figure it out now, too.’ Boy, did I fail!
Our final reader is ready to fail, and loving every moment:
My big failure? Not sure yet, but I decided to move to New York, as I love the city and was born here. This move is a surefire way to a lot of failures, but at the same time it is a big adventure—the adventure I call life!
As always, send your breakthroughs by simply replying to this email. Let me know if you’d prefer to remain anonymous.
Until next week,
Mark Manson
#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
My Website** — My Books — **My YouTube Channel
Research Techniques
“Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).”
—John Durham Peters, in a wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books about his new book The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media
Posted by:
Matt Thomas
Engineering for Slow Internet
Hello everyone! I got partway through writing this post while I was still in Antarctica, but I departed before finishing it.
I’m going through my old draft posts, and I found that this one was nearly complete.
It’s a bit of a departure from the normal content you’d find on brr.fyi, but it reflects my software / IT engineering background.
I hope folks find this to be an interesting glimpse into the on-the-ground reality of using the Internet in bandwidth-constrained environments.
Please keep in mind that I wrote the majority of this post ~7 months ago, so it’s likely that the IT landscape has shifted since then.
Welcome back for a bonus post about Engineering for Slow Internet!
For a 14-month period, while working in Antarctica, I had access to the Internet only through an extremely limited series of satellite links provided by the United States Antarctic Program.
Before I go further, this post requires a special caveat, above and beyond my standard disclaimer:
Even though I was an IT worker within the United States Antarctic Program, everything I am going to discuss in this post is based on either publicly-available information, or based on my own observations as a regular participant living on ice.
I have not used any internal access or non-public information in writing this post.
As a condition of my employment, I agreed to a set of restrictions regarding public disclosure of non-public Information Technology material. I fully intend to honor these restrictions. These restrictions are ordinary and typical of US government contract work.
It is unlikely that I will be able to answer additional questions about matters I discuss in this post. I’ve taken great care to write as much as I am able to, without disclosing non-public information regarding government IT systems.
Good? Ok, here we go.
… actually wait, sorry, one more disclaimer.
This information reflects my own personal experience in Antarctica, from August 2022 through December 2022 at McMurdo, and then from December 2022 through November 2023 at the South Pole.
Technology moves quickly, and I make no claims that the circumstances of my own specific experience will hold up over time. In future years, once I’ve long-since forgotten about this post, please do not get mad at me when the on-the-ground IT experience in Antarctica evolves away from the snapshot presented here.
Ok, phew. Here we go for real.
It’s a non-trivial feat of engineering to get any Internet at the South Pole! If you’re bored, check out the South Pole Satellite Communications page on the public USAP.gov website, for an overview of the limited selection of satellites available for Polar use.
If you’re interested, perhaps also look into the 2021 Antarctic Subsea Cable Workshop for an overview of some hurdles associated with running traditional fiber to the continent.
I am absolutely not in a position of authority to speculate on the future of Antarctic connectivity! Seriously. I was a low-level, seasonal IT worker in a large, complex organization. Do not email me your ideas for improving Internet access in Antarctica – I am not in a position to do anything with them.
I do agree with the widespread consensus on the matter: There is tremendous interest in improving connectivity to US research stations in Antarctica. I would timidly conjecture that, at some point, there will be engineering solutions to these problems. Improved connectivity will eventually arrive in Antarctica, either through enhanced satellite technologies or through the arrival of fiber to the continent.
But – that world will only exist at some point in the future. Currently, Antarctic connectivity is extremely limited. What do I mean by that?
Until very recently, at McMurdo, nearly a thousand people, plus numerous scientific projects and operational workloads, all relied on a series of links that provided max, aggregate speeds of a few dozen megabits per second to the entire station. For comparison, that’s less bandwidth shared by everyone combined than what everyone individually can get on a typical 4g cellular network in an American suburb.
Things are looking up! The NSF recently announced some important developments regarding Starlink at McMurdo and Palmer.
I’m aware that the on-the-ground experience in McMurdo and Palmer is better now than it was even just a year ago.
But – as of October 2023, the situation was still pretty dire at the South Pole. As far as I’m aware, similar developments regarding Starlink have not yet been announced for South Pole Station.
As of October 2023, South Pole had the limitations described above, plus there was only connectivity for a few hours a day, when the satellites rose above the horizon and the station was authorized to use them. The satellite schedule generally shifts forward (earlier) by about 4 minutes per day, due to the difference between Sidereal time and Solar (Civil) time.
The current satellite schedule can be found online, on the South Pole Satellite Communications page of the public USAP.gov website. Here’s an example of the schedule from October 2023:
South Pole satellite schedule, for two weeks in October 2023.
These small intermittent links to the outside world are shared by everyone at Pole, for operational, science, and community / morale usage.
Complicating matters further is the unavoidable physics of this connectivity. These satellites are in a high orbit, thousands of miles up. This means high latency. If you’ve used a consumer satellite product such as HughesNet or ViaSat, you’ll understand.
From my berthing room at the South Pole, it was about 750 milliseconds, round trip, for a packet to get to and from a terrestrial US destination. This is about ten times the latency of a round trip between the US East and West coasts (up to 75 ms). And it’s about thirty times the expected latency of a healthy connection from your home, on a terrestrial cable or fiber connection, to most major content delivery networks (up to 25 ms).
Seriously, I can’t emphasize how jarring this is. At my apartment back home, on GPON fiber, it’s about 3 ms roundtrip to Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront, Akamai, and Google. At the South Pole, the latency was over two hundred and fifty times greater.
I can’t go into more depth about how USAP does prioritization, shaping, etc, because I’m not authorized to share these details. Suffice to say, if you’re an enterprise network engineer used to working in a bandwidth-constrained environment, you’ll feel right at home with the equipment, tools, and techniques used to manage Antarctic connectivity.
Any individual trying to use the Internet for community use at the South Pole, as of October 2023, likely faced:
- Round-trip latency averaging around 750 milliseconds, with jitter between packets sometimes exceeding several seconds.
- Available speeds, to the end-user device, that range from a couple kbps (yes, you read that right), up to 2 mbps on a really good day.
- Extreme congestion, queueing, and dropped packets, far in excess of even the worst oversaturated ISP links or bufferbloat-infested routers back home.
- Limited availability, frequent dropouts, and occasional service preemptions.
These constraints drastically impact the modern web experience! Some of it is unavoidable. The link characteristics described above are truly bleak. But – a lot of the end-user impact is caused by web and app engineering which fails to take slow/intermittent links into consideration.
If you’re an app developer reading this, can you tell me, off the top of your head, how your app behaves on a link with 40 kbps available bandwidth, 1,000 ms latency, occasional jitter of up to 2,000 ms, packet loss of 10%, and a complete 15-second connectivity dropout every few minutes?
It’s probably not great! And yet – these are real-world performance parameters that I encountered, under certain conditions, at the South Pole. It’s normally better than this, but this does occur, and it occurs often enough that it’s worth taking seriously.
This is what happens when you have a tiny pipe to share among high-priority operational needs, plus dozens of community users. Operational needs are aggressively prioritized, and the community soaks up whatever is left.
I’m not expecting miracles here! Obviously no amount of client engineering can make, say, real-time video conferencing work under these conditions. But – getting a few bytes of text in and out should still be possible! I know it is possible, because some apps are still able to do it. Others are not.
Detailed, Real-world Example
One day at the South Pole, I was trying to load the website of <$enterprise_collaboration_platform> in my browser. It’s huge! It needed to load nearly 20 MB of Javascript, just to render the main screen! And of course, the app had been updated since last time I loaded it, so all of my browser’s cached assets were stale and had to be re-downloaded.
Fine! It’s slow, but at least it will work… eventually, right? Browsers do a decent job of handling slow Internet. Under the hood, the underlying protocols do a decent job at congestion control. I should get a steady trickle of data. This will be subject to the negotiated send and receive windows between client and server, which are based on the current level of congestion on the link, and which are further influenced by any shaping done by middleware along the way.
It’s a complex webapp, so the app developer would also need to implement some of their own retry logic. This allows for recovery in the event that individual assets fail, especially for those long, multi-second total connectivity dropouts. But eventually, given enough time, the transfers should complete.
Unfortunately, this is where things broke down and got really annoying. The developers implemented a global failure trigger somewhere in the app. If the app didn’t fully load within the parameters specified by the developer (time? number of retries? I’m not sure.), then the app stopped, gave up, redirected you to an error page, dropped all the loading progress you’d made, and implemented aggressive cache-busting countermeasures for next time you retried.
I cannot tell you how frustrating this was! Connectivity at the South Pole was never going to meet the performance expectations set by engineers using a robust terrestrial Internet connection. It’s not a good idea to hardcode a single, static, global expectation for how long 20 MB of Javascript should take to download. Why not let me load it at my own pace? I’ll get there when I get there. As long as data is still moving, however slow, just let it run.
But – the developers decided that if the app didn’t load within the parameters they set, I couldn’t use it at all. And to be clear – this was primarily a messaging app. The actual content payload here, when the app is running and I’m chatting with my friends, is measured in bytes.
As it turns out, our Internet performance at the South Pole was right on the edge of what the app developers considered “acceptable”. So, if I kept reloading the page, and if I kept letting it re-download the same 20 MB of Javascript, and if I kept putting up with the developer’s cache-busting shenanigans, eventually it finished before the artificial failure criteria.
What this means is that I wasted extra bandwidth doing all these useless reloads, and it took sometimes hours before I was able to use the app. All of this hassle, even though, if left alone, I could complete the necessary data transfer in 15 minutes. Several hours (and a shameful amount of retried Javascript) later, I was finally able to send a short, text-based message to my friends.
…all so that I could send a 1.8 KB HTTPS POST…
Does this webapp really need to be 20 MB? What all is being loaded that could be deferred until it is needed, or included in an “optional” add-on bundle? Is there a possibility of a “lite” version, for bandwidth-constrained users?
In my 14 months in Antarctica, I collected dozens of examples of apps like this, with artificial constraints built in that rendered them unusable or borderline-unusable.
For the rest of this post, I’ll outline some of my major frustrations, and what I would have liked to see instead that would mitigate the issues.
I understand that not every app is in a position to implement all of these! If you’re a tiny app, just getting off the ground, I don’t expect you to spend all of your development time optimizing for weirdos in Antarctica.
Yes, Antarctica is an edge case! Yes, 750 ms / 10% packet loss / 40 kbps is rather extreme. But the South Pole was not uniquely bad. There are entire commercial marine vessels that rely on older Inmarsat solutions for a few hundred precious kbps of data while at sea. There’s someone at a remote research site deep in the mountains right now, trying to load your app on a Thales MissionLink using the Iridium Certus network at a few dozen kbps. There are folks behind misconfigured routers, folks with flaky wifi, folks stuck with fly-by-night WISPs delivering sub-par service. Folks who still use dial-up Internet connections over degraded copper phone lines.
These folks are worthy of your consideration. At the very least, you should make an effort to avoid actively interfering with their ability to use your products.
So, without further ado, here are some examples of development patterns that routinely caused me grief at the South Pole.
Hardcoded Timeouts, Hardcoded Chunk Size
As per the above example, do not hardcode your assumptions about how long a given payload will take to transfer, or how much you can transfer in a single request.
- If you have the ability to measure whether bytes are flowing, and they are, leave them alone, no matter how slow. Perhaps show some UI indicating what is happening.
- If you are doing an HTTPS call, fall back to a longer timeout if the call fails. Maybe it just needs more time under current network conditions.
- If you’re having trouble moving large amounts of data in a single HTTPS call, break it up. Divide the content into chunks, transfer small chunks at a time, and diligently keep track of the progress, to allow resuming and retrying small bits without losing all progress so far. Slow, steady, incremental progress is better than a one-shot attempt to transfer a huge amount of data.
- If you can’t get an HTTPS call done successfully, do some troubleshooting. Try DNS, ICMP, HTTP (without TLS), HTTPS to a known good status endpoint, etc. This information might be helpful for troubleshooting, and it’s better than blindly retrying the same end-to-end HTTPS call. This HTTPS call requires a bunch of under-the-hood stuff to be working properly. Clearly it’s not, so you should make an effort to figure out why and let your user know.
Example 1 - In-App Metadata Download
A popular desktop application tries to download some configuration information from the vendor’s website at startup. There is a hardcoded timeout for the HTTPS call. If it fails, the app will not load. It’ll just keep retrying the same call, with the same parameters, forever. It’ll sit on the loading page, without telling you what’s wrong. I’ve confirmed this is what’s happening by reading the logs.
Luckily, if you kept trying, the call would eventually make it through under network conditions I experienced at the South Pole.
It’s frustrating that just a single hardcoded timeout value, in an otherwise perfectly-functional and enterprise-grade application, can render it almost unusable. The developers could have:
- Fallen back to increasingly-long timeouts to try and get a successful result.
- Done some connection troubleshooting to infer more about the current network environment, and responded accordingly.
- Shown UX explaining what was going on.
- Used a cached or default-value configuration, if it couldn’t get the live one, instead of simply refusing to load.
- Provided a mechanism for the user to manually download and install the required data, bypassing the app’s built-in (and naive) download logic.
Example 2 - Chat Apps
A popular chat app (“app #1”) maintains a websocket for sending and receiving data. The initialization process for that websocket uses a hardcoded 10-second timeout. Upon cold boot, when network conditions are especially congested, that websocket setup can sometimes take more than 10 seconds! We have to do a full TCP handshake, then set up a TLS session, then set up the websocket, then do initial signaling over the websocket. Remember – under some conditions, each individual roundtrip at the South Pole took multiple seconds!
If the 10-second timeout elapses, the app simply does not work. It enters a very long backoff state before retrying. The UX does not clearly show what is happening.
On the other hand, a competitor’s chat app (“app #2”) does very well in extremely degraded network conditions! It has multiple strategies for sending network requests, for resilience against certain types of degradation. It aggressively re-uses open connections. It dynamically adjusts timeouts. In the event of a failure, it intelligently chooses a retry cadence. And, throughout all of this, it has clear UX explaining current network state.
The end result is that I could often use app #2 in network conditions when I could not use app #1. Both of them were just transmitting plain text! Just a few actual bytes of content! And even when I could not use app #2, it was at least telling me what it was trying to do. App #1 is written naively, with baked-in assumptions about connectivity that simply did not hold true at the South Pole. App #2 is written well, and it responds gracefully to the conditions it encounters in the wild.
Example 3 - Incremental Transfer
A chance to talk about my own blog publishing toolchain!
The site you’re reading right now is a static Jekyll blog. Assets are stored on S3 and served through CloudFront. I build the static files locally here on my laptop, and I upload them directly to S3. Nothing fancy. No servers, no QA environment, no build system, no automated hooks, nothing dynamic.
Given the extreme connectivity constraints at the South Pole, I wrote a Python script for publishing to S3 that worked well in the challenging environment. It uses the S3 API to upload assets in small chunks. It detects and resumes failed uploads without losing progress. It waits until everything is safely uploaded before publishing the new version.
If I can do it, unpaid, working alone, for my silly little hobby blog, in 200 lines of Python… surely your team of engineers can do so for your flagship webapp.
50 things I know
- I know what makes people grow more reliably than anything else. It is: taking on a difficult project with some amount of public accountability. This can be large or small: a lecture series, a business, a blog, a house, a child, etc.
- It’s strange, but I know that it’s common to resist positive emotions, as well as negative ones. Ask yourself, next time you’re doing something enjoyable: are you really surrendering to the full enjoyment available here? The answer will often be no. Perhaps this has something to do with how displays of rapturous delight are often discouraged in adolescence.
- I’ve worked with hundreds of unhappy creative people, and I can boil down most of my transferable insight into one sentence. I know that it feels horrible to create from a place of defense. For example: you will find it exceedingly difficult to write if your motive is trying to convince people that you are *not dumb, *or *not boring, *or if you’re hoping that you will not offend anybody.
- I know that being silly is a gift. You un-taboo silliness for everyone around you.
- I know that most people overrate the difficulty of hard conversations, and underrate how good it is to have them. Conflict avoidance slowly rots your whole life, and many people are about eight awkward discussions from a much-improved existence. In other words, go squash all of your beefs. This book is a decent start if you have no idea how to do this.
- I know that hospitality is one domain in which giving is receiving. I’ve regretted spending money on many things, but never food I’ve fed to friends.
- I know that the people who will make you feel warm and fuzzy when you’re sad, and the people who will give you brutally honest feedback, are usually different people. Ideally you want to have relationships with both kinds, and reward them for their strengths, rather than getting mad at them for failing to do what they’re bad at.
- I know that people really and truly cannot read your mind. It’s easy to think that people are ignoring your wants or emotions because they don’t care about you. But it’s likely that they have no idea what those are. If you’ve told them, they’ve likely forgotten, and may need a reminder — they have their own whole crowded bubble of consciousness going on!
- I know that travel is valuable because most knowledge can’t be written down. The most crucial info about a society is how it feels to be there—the rhythms of street life, where and when people eat meals, how gender works. You can read a million things about Japan without knowing the bodily experience of walking around in a truly high-trust society, for example.
- I know that sometimes, persistence is not a virtue. I would trade my other abilities to be an exceptional songwriter. I gave it a serious enough try to know that I don’t have the knack, for years, and I’m not interested in being publicly mediocre at the performing arts. My life is incalculably better for having let the dream go. The world will be happiest with a certain range of behaviors from you—life will be easier if you find a place in that range where you’re content. David Whyte calls this the conversational nature of reality, and he is correct about the importance of this concept.
- I know that talent doesn’t feel like you’re amazing. It feels like the difficulties that trouble others are mysteriously absent in your case. Don’t ask yourself where your true gifts lie. Ask what other people seem weirdly bad at.
- I know that cabbage is underestimated. Braised cabbage is delicious. Quarter a head of cabbage, sear on all sides in a cast iron pan until slightly blackened, braise with white wine and chicken stock (or this, if you’re vegetarian) until tender, add more butter than seems reasonable, throw some thyme in the pan if you’re fancy, finish with a squeeze of lemon and some Maldon salt. Also, sauerkraut is one of the few foods that will almost always make you feel good.
- I know that environmental influence is the most effective form of behavioral control. Accordingly, if you want radical change, radically change your environment. Being in the wrong city will cancel out years of self-improvement.
- I know a ridiculous-sounding tip that could make your whole life more satisfying. You might be breathing too high up in your chest. To correct this instantly, pretend you’re breathing through your asshole.
- I know how to spot real confidence. Look for people who are fluid with status—who allow themselves to be the butt of a joke, or accept criticism, but also avoid false modesty, and inhabit the spotlight when it falls on them. One might call this a balance between dignity and humility. Pro tip: people who always cling to high status aren’t confident in the normal sense, they are cult leader types, which is a different animal.
- I know that sometimes people unfairly collapse reality via cliche. Your money management issue might be described as a “first world problem,” or your changing desires a “midlife crisis,” by yourself or others. This is a way of dismissing your complexity.
- I know that people are too eager to recommend their current lifestyle and disavow their developmentally important previous decisions. For example, you will notice people who had a lot of casual sex when they were young saying later that committed relationships are obviously superior to dating casually—neglecting to notice that their wild young days were psychologically necessary for them.
- I know that unless you are exceptionally good with ripostes, the best way to win a fight with an angry person on the internet is to not respond. They will look ridiculous fuming impotently on their own.
- I know that if you’re a man who cringes at the idea of owning your masculinity, you will have a better time if you own your masculinity.
- Relatedly, I know that men should give combat sports a try, at least for a short time. For men, fighting is as basic as sex, maybe more basic. If you haven’t acquainted yourself with that part of your nature, there is a fundamental element of your psychology that remains mysterious, and a fundamental human ability you haven’t explored. It’s likely that you are engaging in surrogate combat without realizing it, or suffering from suppressed aggression. Two years of BJJ didn’t make me a good fighter, but it did give me more self-knowledge than an equivalent amount of therapy.
- I know that if you tell someone “we should keep in touch,” you will not keep in touch. Instead say, “I’m going to schedule a phone call with you in two months to catch up, I’ll send you the invite — if we need to adjust when we get closer to the date, that’s fine.”
- I am not the funniest person, but I am funny enough, and I know how to become funnier if you’re not naturally gifted at comedy. Simply say the stupidest things that enter your head, in a normal tone of voice.
- I know that it’s easy to observe when people are feeling insecure. Notice how much they are mentioning their positive attributes, material possessions, or important friends, when there’s no conversational reason for this to be occurring other than a status claim. It is harder to spot yourself doing this, but it is worth the effort — you are likely doing it occasionally. I certainly do.
- I know that limerence can be misleading. It can be the beginning of a good relationship, or a complete disaster. If someone feels like the answer to the question of your life, you might want to address the fundamental sense of lack that they are triggering.
- I know that the legal profession does a great job of identifying competence and rewarding it financially. Cheap lawyers are expensive.
- Listening is a neglected social skill. But I know that an even more neglected social skill is candor.
- I know that there are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative. Concrete example: let’s say you’re listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You’re in the appreciative mode. Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they’re consistent? You’re in the evaluative mode. Much of sanity, and happiness, consists of finding the right mode for the right moment. The appreciative mode is terrible for debugging your business plan. But the evaluative mode is terrible for having a first date. A lot of capable, intelligent people suffer because they do not have the ability to switch out of the evaluative mode, or even notice that they’re in it.
- I know that you cannot skip to the punchline of the cosmic joke. If you’re ambitious, it will be hard to believe that achievement won’t make you completely happy until you accumulate some achievements, and notice the gaps in your happiness. Legend has it that the Buddha woke up at 35, and this seems about right — by your mid-thirties, you have probably been productively disillusioned by at least one serious personal disappointment.
- I know that some annoying-sounding things that mystics or Zen teachers say, about cosmic oneness or the flow of the Dao, are actually just straightforward descriptions of what the world looks like from a certain point in the contemplative path. “The original face you had before your parents were born” is a phrase that will make perfect, undeniable, beautiful sense if you meditate long enough. And then you will annoy people by trying to explain it.
- I know that you are almost always not the only one experiencing a person’s challenging attributes. Is your boss being privately abusive to you? They are likely doing it to someone else, or have before. Can’t believe that person is always monopolizing the meeting? Someone else is also annoyed. Now, solving these collective action problems is tricky — but realizing that you’re not alone is the first step.
- Emotional suppression can be a great short-term coping strategy. The problem, long-term, is that it is not surgically precise. I know you can’t suppress pain and anger without also deadening yourself generally. When I started to release my childhood resentments, I was surprised to find myself surrounded by brighter colors.
- I know how to throw a good party. Get everyone in large rooms, ideally one large room. Make it feel almost overcrowded, to increase social optionality and accidental touch. It should spill outside a little bit, weather permitting. Have good food and drink in abundance. The ideal volume level creates pockets of intimacy via noise but doesn’t require shouting. The ideal light level is dim-bright. Invite a variety of archetypes—too many high-achievers and it will feel tediously networky, too many slouchy hippies and it will feel like an inert cuddle puddle. Have party smokes if it’s a night party—even very classy people sometimes want a cigarette when they drink, and they will appreciate it so much. If you want your party to be sexy, do not advertise that you want this, just get the gender balance right and lower the lighting a bit, put on the right music, and perhaps assign a costume requirement that will give people license to be outrageous.
- I know that if your significant other asks you to do an irritating-for-them task that is not especially difficult, you should be thankful. They have given you an unambiguous way to earn points in the relationship, which is how you get a nice life going. Usually, achieving personal flourishing is more complex than taking out the garbage.
- I know that in a really great relationship or friendship, you should be able to state your needs without explanation. “I need attention.” “Some cheese would make me happy.” “I want to express a feeling that I don’t endorse.” “I am looking for a compliment.” “Can you tell me that I’m cute and good right now?”
- I know that disembodiment is a real and pervasive mental issue afflicting cerebral people. The phrase “stuck in your head” isn’t metaphorical, it refers to the arbitrary sense that your perceptual home base is a golfball-sized hole in the middle of your head. I used to have it, and it is a massive downgrade versus correctly perceiving your awareness as a property distributed throughout your head, body, and immediate environment. This is one good resource for tackling the issue, and this is another.
- I know how to peel ginger. Use a spoon. The first time you do this, you’ll feel like you’re Neo with a fresh brain full of downloaded kung fu skills.
- I know that if you have a serious dispute with someone, it will go nowhere unless you clearly name the underlying emotion that you’re struggling with. If you’re afraid that your partner will abandon you, cataloging their flaws will not communicate this effectively.
- I know that if you are not unusually hard-working or competitive or smart, you can still distinguish yourself. Be unusual in some other noticeable, likable way—unusually honest, brave, generous, curious, or pleasant. All of these attributes are composed of discrete behaviors that can be learned through practice.
- I know that you can’t see the counterfactual. Perhaps the stressed-out person you know isn’t convincing when they recommend the calming effects of lavender or exercise. But what you don’t observe is the maniac they would be without their remedies.
- I know that freedom is earned by confronting things that embarrass and trigger you, over and over again, until you are cringe-proof in your desired environment.
- I know that it is powerful to state your weaknesses and limitations. Try this on for size: “I’m abandoning this debate because you are more qualified to have an opinion.” “I’d like to finish this project quickly because I don’t like to work hard.” “I realize that I don’t believe what’s coming out of my mouth.” “I’m worried that I’m taking this decision too seriously and I’m not adding value by fretting over it.”
- I know that we are all thoughts in the mind of God.
- I know how to instantly calm yourself, and, in social situations, ground your energy, thus making you more charismatic. Without effort, include the bottom of your feet in your conscious awareness.
- I know how to handle a day when you feel extremely lazy. Decide that, given that you’re a lazy person, you will work diligently for only 30 entirely focused minutes on the most important thing, and then take the rest of the day off. You will do your best work on these days.
- I know that among my regrets, one of the sharpest is refusing to accept a sincere apology. Offering an olive branch takes courage. Try to reward this, even from people who you don’t believe deserve forgiveness.
- I know that intelligent people who are not emotionally or socially aware can be easily fooled and driven insane. You just have to hand them an unsolvable Rubik’s cube and convince them that it is the most important thing in the world. This will trigger their desire to be special, or their fear of being useless or bad, and they will not know this is happening, they’ll just tear their hair out trying to solve the unsolvable Rubik’s cube. Entire social groups and movements are built on this.
- I know that simplistic stories about happiness leave out crucial details. For example: Yes, relationships are more important than career, ultimately. But some career success might give you a greater ability to locate people you’re compatible with later on, as friends or partners.
- I know that silence is an underused conversational tactic. It makes people more interesting and builds intimacy.
- I know that, if you can pull it off, you should continuously have mentors, and be offering mentorship. This can be as formal or informal as you want.
- I know that almost nobody hears too many sincere compliments. Compliment them to their face. Then, compliment them behind their back. Practice naming pleasant feelings you have about people, as soon as they bubble up, in the moment: “It’s always fun to see you.” Lower the resistance around this to zero.
This article’s format is entirely stolen from
, who knows twice as many things as I know**. Photo credit goes to Saul Leiter.
18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian – The Marginalian
Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.
This is all to say: Ever since I first began reflecting on what I have learned about living with each passing year of writing The Marginalian (because writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life), these learnings have always been profoundly personal — not overt advice to anyone else, but notes to myself about what I have needed to learn and keep relearning. I write them and share them for the same reason I read — so that we may feel less alone in our individual experience, which is just a commonplace fractal of the total human experience. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin reflected in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)
On this 18th anniversary of the birth of The Marginalian, here are all of these learnings so far as they were originally written in years past, beginning with the present year’s — the most challenging and most transformative of my life.
- How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. (Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability — and “weakness” is just a judgment term for vulnerability — but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.) Seek to be such a person.
And here, drawn from the archive, are 18 pieces consonant with these learnings — readings and writings that have fomented these reckonings with how to live.
1. Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss
2. An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days
3. How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older
4. Love Anyway
5. The Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence
6. What Happens When We Die
7. Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
8. A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings
9. The Missing Piece Meets the Big O: Shel Silverstein’s Sweet Allegory for the Simple Secret of Love and the Key to Nurturing Relationships
10. The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular
11. The Eternal Lyric of Love and Loss: “Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Little-Known Poems for the Tragic Love of Her Life
12. What Birds Dream About: The Evolution of REM and How We Practice the Possible in Our Sleep
13. The Bittersweet Story of the Real-Life Peaceful Bull Who Inspired Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Ferdinand
14. A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating Century-Old Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want
15. An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection
16. The Monarchs, Music, and the Meaning of Life: The Most Touching Deathbed Love Letter Ever Written
17. How to See More Clearly and Love More Purely: Iris Murdoch on the Angst of Not Knowing Ourselves and Each Other
18. The Donkey and the Meaning of Eternity: Nobel-Winning Spanish Poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Love Letter to Life
100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying | Life and style | The Guardian
Bring fruit to work. Bring fruit to bed! Illustrations: Leon Edler/The Guardian
Whether it’s taking fruit to work (and to the bedroom!), being polite to rude strangers or taking up skinny-dipping, here’s a century of ways to make life better, with little effort involved …
1 Exercise on a Monday night (nothing fun happens on a Monday night).
2 On the fence about a purchase? Wait 72 hours before you buy it.
3 Tip: the quickest supermarket queue is always behind the fullest trolley (greeting, paying and packing take longer than you think).
4 Bring fruit to work. Bring fruit to bed!
5 Consider going down to four days a week. It’s likely a disproportionate amount of your fifth day’s work is taxed anyway, so you’ll lose way less than a fifth of your take-home pay.
6 Everyone has an emotional blind spot when they fight. Work out what yours is, and remember it.
7 Plant spring bulbs, even if they’re just in a pot.
8 Send a voice note instead of a text; they sound like personal mini podcasts.
9 Keep a bird feeder by a window, ideally the kitchen. It’ll pass the time when you’re washing up.
10 Always bring ice to house parties (there’s never enough).
**11 **Get the lighting right: turn off the overhead one, turn on lots of lamps (but turn off when you leave the room).
12 Sharpen your knives.
13 Feeling sluggish at work? Try the Pomodoro technique: 25 minutes on, five-minute break, and repeat.
14 Buy a cheap blender and use it to finely chop onions (it saves on time and tears).
15 Keep your children’s drawings and paintings. Put the best ones in frames.
16 Set aside 10 minutes a day to do something you really enjoy – be it reading a book or playing Halo.
17 Don’t be weird about how to stack the dishwasher.
18 Reuse all plastic bags – even bread bags. Much of the packaging you can’t reuse can be taken to larger branches of supermarkets for recycling.
19 Take a photo of the tag you are given when leaving your coat in a cloakroom.
20 Can’t sleep? Try a relaxing soak with lavender bath oil before bed.
21 Add the milk at least one minute after the tea has brewed.
22 Laugh shamelessly at your own jokes.
23 It might sound obvious, but a pint of water before bed after a big night avoids a clanger of a hanger.
24 Start a Saturday morning with some classical music – it sets the tone for a calm weekend.
25 Look closely.
26 Set time limits for your apps. Just go to the settings on your smartphone and add a limit – for example, if you have an iPhone turn on Screen Time.
27 If possible, take the stairs.
28 Always be willing to miss the next train.
29 Eat meat once a week, max. Ideally less.
30 Be polite to rude strangers – it’s oddly thrilling.
31 Ask questions, and listen to the answers.
32 Connect with nature: stand outside barefoot for a few minutes – even when it’s cold.
33 Join your local library – and use it. Find yours here.
34 Go for a walk without your phone.
35 Eat salted butter (life’s too short for unsalted).
36 Stretch in the morning. And maybe in the evening.
37 If you’re going less than a mile, walk or cycle. About half of car journeys are under two miles, yet these create more pollution than longer journeys as the engine isn’t warmed up yet.
38 Sleep with your phone in a different room (and buy an alarm clock).
39 Send postcards from your holidays. Send them even if you’re not on holiday.
40 Instead of buying new shoes, get old ones resoled and buy new laces.
41 Buy a plant. Think you’ll kill it? Buy a fake one.
42 Don’t have Twitter on your phone.
43 If you find an item of clothing you love and are certain you will wear for ever, buy three.
44 Try taking a cold shower (30 seconds to two minutes) before your hot one. It’s good for your health – both physical and mental.
45 Text to say thank you.
46 Read a poem every day. Keep a compendium, such as A Poem for Every Day of the Year, by your bed.
47 Take out your headphones when walking – listen to the world.
48 Buy secondhand.
49 Buy in person!
50 Learn how to floss properly.
51 If something in the world is making you angry, write (politely) to your MP – they will read it.
52 Say hello to your neighbours.
53 Learn the basics of repairing your clothes.
https://www.theguardian.com/email/form/plaintone/inside-saturday
54 Always bring something – wine, flowers – to a dinner/birthday party, even if they say not to.
55 Learn the names of 10 trees.
56 Call an old friend out of the blue.
57 Every so often, search your email for the word “unsubscribe” and then use it on as many as you can.
58 Buy a newspaper. (Ideally this one.)
59 Always have dessert.
60 Drop your shoulders.
61 Make something from scratch. Works best if it’s something you’d normally buy, such as a dress or a bag.
62 Go to bed earlier – but don’t take your phone with you.
63 Volunteer. Go to gov.uk/government/get-involved for ideas.
64 Dry your cutlery with a cloth (it keeps it shiny).
65 Instead of buying a morning coffee, set up a daily transfer of £2 from a current into a savings account and forget about it. Use it to treat yourself to something different later.
66 Don’t save things for “best”. Wear them – enjoy them.
67 Sing!
68 Think about your posture: don’t slouch, and don’t cross your legs.
69 Hang your clothes up. Ideally on non-wire hangers (it’s better for them).
70 Skinny-dip with friends.
71 Switch your phone off on holiday (or at least delete your work email app).
72 Always use freshly ground pepper.
73 Thank a teacher who changed your life.
74 Respect your youngers.
75 Keep your keys in the same place.
76 Ditch the plastic cartons and find a milkman – The Modern Milkman has a comprehensive list.
77 Rent rather than buy a suit/dress for that forthcoming wedding (even if it’s your own).
78 Always book an extra day off after a holiday.
79 Ignore the algorithm – listen to music outside your usual taste.
80 Mute or leave a WhatsApp group chat.
81 Learn a TikTok dance (but don’t post it on TikTok).
82 Cook something you’ve never attempted before.
83 Join a local litter-picking group.
84 Handwash that thing you’ve never cleaned.
85 Don’t get a pet/do get a pet.
86 Nap.
87 Learn how to breathe deeply: in through the nose, out through the mouth, making the exhale longer than the inhale.
88 Buy a bike and use it. Learn how to fix it, too.
89 Politely decline invitations if you don’t want to go.
90 If you do go, have an exit strategy (can we recommend a French exit, where you slip out unseen).
91 If in doubt, add cheese.
92 Don’t look at your phone at dinner.
No expert, no guru - Austin Kleon
Call me an “expert,” and I will correct you. Call me a “guru,” and I might throw up on you.
Re: “expert”: My books are the by-products of the process of trying to figure out how to be a writer and an artist. When I write, when I publish, when I speak, it is in the spirit of being a fellow student. I am simply sharing the things that I am learning. I not only do not consider myself an expert, being an expert seems unbelievably boring to me. Becoming an expert, to me, seems like a kind of spiritual death. A kind of creative petrification. (As my friend Mike Monteiro recently put it, “the secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.”)
Re: “guru”: What reasonable human being would actually want to be a guru? (Again: answers are boring. Questions are interesting.) The people in American culture who position themselves as gurus seem to all have either what the comedian Bill Hicks called “a fevered ego,” or they seem to have some extreme character deficiency. More than that, from what I’ve seen, the more you’re considered a “guru,” the harder it is to tell what it is that you actually do. (My nightmare is becoming someone who talks about making art more than actually making art.)
On top of all that, I am starting to feel that the best teacher is the one who refuses you as a student. I’ll end with this parable from John Cage’s Silence:
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: bill hicks, byproducts, experts, gurus, john cage, mike monteiro, parables, teaching
#45: Rage against self-checkout - by Haley Nahman
Maybe Baby is a free Sunday newsletter. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $5/mo, you’ll gain access to my monthly advice column, Dear Baby, as well as my Tuesday weekly podcast. Thank you! (You’ll never see an ad either way.)
Good morning and happy Daylight Savings Time!
It’s currently 5:17 p.m. on Thursday for me and the sun is streaming through my living room window and I can hear kids playing outside and I’m wearing my summer shorts. Next week it will be this light at 6:17 p.m., which is very good. Although it’s still March and it won’t be reliably warm for a while, this past week of sunshine, combined with the promise of more vaccines, has felt so existentially encouraging I could cry. I recently remembered this old Instagram caption of mine from 2019 and would like to raise it a year-long pandemic: “The best thing about the first sunny weekend of the year is realizing you’ve been sad for three months but just forgot.”
https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/6Vmow8PuUaU7W1T2WWLZk2
Rage against self-checkout
Avi and I are at the grocery store and we’ve just finished our shopping. There is a long line snaking behind the single cashier working, and to her left, an empty bank of self-checkout machines. We look between them cartoonishly. It feels like a trick. “Let’s do it!” I say, heaving one of our baskets onto a mini self-checkout counter. Avi sets the other on the ground.
We’ve come here spontaneously, so our first problem is we don’t have bags. Self-checkout, of course, has none, but to our right is a wall of “sustainable” options for sale. I pick one up. The material is impossible to describe—like something you might barf in on an airplane, but also flammable. I buy two, knowing I will never use them again because I have 15 canvas totes at home. I swipe their tags across the counter and notice the plastic loop is wrapped around the handles, rendering them useless. I grip the tag between my hands and rip, cutting into my fingers. I do this twice.
For the next five minutes, mayhem ensues. First the bag doesn’t fit on the scale, but when we remove it, the machine beeps at us like criminals, so we maneuver it back on. Next the machine does not recognize a bag of chips. Then we don’t know what kind of avocados we’ve picked. Then the bag fills up, and we try to take it off to make room for the other bag, and it beeps again. PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA! The machine repeats this so many times, and at such an alarming volume, that an attendant, standing bored against a wall, comes running. She puts in a code and we start swiping some more. When the second bag fills up, we try to add a block of cheese to the first bag. PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA! Exasperated, and also panicking, we put it directly on the scale, teetering on the edge. By the end I’m using both hands to keep it all in place, every muscle in my body clenched as if I’m playing Twister, wondering how, exactly, this is better than chatting about the weather with a trained employee.
There is a pervasive belief in modern society, at least among capitalists, that technology can solve everything, or that more technology is always better than less. Baked into this belief is an entire value system: that what technology offers—ease, speed, efficiency, autonomy, digital experiences—is always better than the opposite: friction, slowness, inefficiency, interdependence, analog. This is not remotely a novel observation—books have been written on this, and nostalgia for a world more firmly rooted in the physical is basically a tentpole of modern life. But tech’s reach, even if we resent it, has become so ubiquitous that most of us have absorbed its priorities. We may be into sustainable clothes and old-school alarm clocks and farm-to-table groceries, for instance, but both are still being shipped to us in two days, ordered via simple, colorful apps, and shared on platforms that connect us to infinite strangers in seconds. #VanLife, one of the most literal examples of a younger generation’s rejection of modernity (i.e. homelessness rebranded by millennials) is best marketed via supercuts on social media, which smooth out every challenge, summing up months in under one minute. Progress has become inextricably linked with ease.
Self-checkout, that “futuristic” invention we all know and love, is my favorite example of what it looks like when this ethos jumps the shark. Perhaps because it sits at the nexus of everything technology is meant to do—make an experience easier, faster, more efficient and autonomous. And it either succeeds, making you feel empty inside, or more likely fails, driving you insane. To top it all off, the actual motivation behind the technology is almost certainly cost-cutting from the reduction in overhead, a savings I can guarantee is not passed on to customers or employees. In this way, it’s the perfect exemplar of late-stage capitalism: a flashy talisman of progress that funnels money to the 1% under the guise of innovation.
Face ID is another good example, recently made nearly obsolete by masks. There’s no way Apple could have foreseen a deadly pandemic that would render this technology useless, but perhaps they could have asked themselves how useful Face ID was in the first place. Or was it just benign advancement for the sake of making more money? Almost every technology that annoys us falls in this trap: finicky touch screens that could be buttons, circuitous chat bots that could be conversations, toilets that automatically flush while you’re still going, misting your body with someone else’s pee. This is the world on technology, a dystopia dressed up as utopia by the few who stand to profit. Of course some of it does serve the greater good (and is also fun), but it’s not a value system that scales infinitely or democratically. Treated as a given, priorities skew, and suddenly a robot is scolding us for trying to buy yogurt and nobody can “afford” to pay a $15 minimum wage in the richest country in the world.
The other day I asked people on Instagram for examples of “progress” that had actually made things worse, citing self-checkout as an example. Let’s call it pseudo-progress. The answers poured in hot and fast, so diverse and specific they felt like a collective scream. “Honestly it would be easier to name a recent invention that *didn’t *reinforce [cultural] hegemony,” replied one person. Reading through the answers was strangely cathartic, so I’ve decided to share some of my favorites below, not including the heavy-hitters like Slack and social media, which cropped up so many times they can almost go without saying. While they’re not all directly linked to tech, what I found most gratifying about these examples of pseudo-progress is nearly all of them fall into the similar trap of assuming one of the aforementioned five factors is more important than it is: ease, speed, autonomy, efficiency, or innovation for the sake of it. Financial incentives, meanwhile, cut horizontally; you can assume they’re always relevant if not the sole driver.
- “Bagel slicers, avocado slicers, egg slicers: all smash the thing you want to slice nicely!”
- “Email (that New Yorker article hit me hard)”
- “Open floor plan work spaces”
- “Checking yourself in at the airport—it never seems to work and you always need help”
- “The 2x-speed button on podcasts” Ed. note: reminds me of this tweet:
joe @ShariaUnclelistening to 2 hrs of waterfall audio at 3x speed so I become tranquil faster
- “‘Smart homes’ that don’t actually work”
- “Venmo. I miss getting a friend’s coffee without them insisting they Venmo me $4.” A related one: “The proliferation of cashless payments in businesses. It’s discriminatory.”
- “Online learning. I keep hearing stories of classes getting taught by videos of professors that are dead.”
- “The BQE: It represented a new era for Brooklyn but ended up dividing neighborhoods and was essentially a tool for redlining.”
- “Providing compostable dishes/utensils but then NOT COMPOSTING ON SITE”
- “Recycling of plastics! It increased plastic production (great NPR article about this).”
- “Wearable technology for ‘health tracking’—perpetuates healthism + disordered eating”
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“Online clothing shopping. You just buy more shit you don’t need and it doesn’t fit.” Ed. note: Got this one so many times
- “Synthetic fibers” and related: “fast fashion”
- “Deep fakes”
- “Healthcare ‘portals,’ which often put more onus on the patient.”
- “Unlimited PTO”
- “Dog walking or sitting services like Rover. They text you when your dog poops.”
-
“Read receipts” Ed note: Got this one so much it surprised me. I’m assuming people are using apps where it’s not possible to turn them off? Maybe dating apps?
- “Turbotax/online tax-filing scam companies”
-
“The millennial direct-to-consumer mall on Bleecker and Lafayette” Ed note: LOL. 100%
- “Bottled water”
- “The IKEA-fication of all furniture. Now you have to assemble everything yourself?”
- “The elimination of the headphone jack on iPhones i.e. the rise of the dongle”
- “The algorithm”
- “Surveillance capitalism”
-
“Botox. It superficially eases age anxiety for user but compounds the issue for the collective.” Ed note: This could be a whole essay!
- “Face filters”
- “Food delivery apps…they aren’t actually making money for the restaurants”
- “When waiters bring the check on an iPad. Makes it way more awkward to leave your phone number”
- “Factory-farming”
- “Fancy induction cooktops they make now where every surface is touchscreen and impossible to use”
- “All of the streaming apps! Why can’t it all be in one place like cable TV?”
- “Assigned seats in movie theaters”
- “Commercialized debt”
- “Private schools”
- “Credit scores”
- And for the speed round, I got: Uber, AirBnb, Tinder, Stevia, GMOs, Juul, Zoom, Alexa, Amazon, Instagram, Spotify, and essentially every newish brand valued in the billions.
It’s easy to name examples of pseudo-progress and harder to imagine our trajectory not barreling toward an increasingly “optimized,” frictionless, smooth-brained world. One where the conditions this pursuit has thus far created—alienation, hypernormalization, mass inequality—only grow starker. In my more optimistic moments, I try to imagine what it might look like to shift our collective priorities. There are many growing movements attempting to do this (ScreenTime, slow tech, slow fashion, wellness, coworking spaces, apps that lull us to sleep like newborn babies), but they often rely on markets or technocratic measures themselves. And like their predecessors, they have a way of rerouting the payoff to a wealthy few, or shifting the burden of responsibility to individuals. Maybe these attempts fail at changing much because the way out of this isn’t new habits, brands, or business ideas, but something less neoliberal and capitalistic. Would we be so obsessed with speed, ease, and efficiency if we didn’t spend so much of our lives working? How might our collective priorities shift if resources abounded and there was less to gain by commodifying ourselves?
Society ❤️ by Avi Bonnerjee
In a book I’m reading called Do What You Love by Miya Tokumitsu, she writes that many of the tropes of modern work, like “do what you love,” are imbued with false promises of upward mobility that simply don’t exist for most people. “When the quality and sincerity of work, say, as a call-center employee fails to deliver security and some measure of comfort,” she writes, “such work exposes the fraudulence of the idea that hard, earnest work guarantees a reward.” More often, it doesn’t. In fact, a recent report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition showed that full-time minimum wage workers in the US cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95 percent of the country, even with their chipper attitudes. Go-getterism, then, is just another idea sold to us as individually empowering that merely maintains our complacency: As long as we think it’s our fault, we can’t complain.
This is exactly why I’ve stopped placing faith in noble entrepreneurs and philanthropists and started placing it in collective action. Which isn’t to say we can’t try to address the issues individually—deprioritize productivity, invite more interdependence, prioritize process over execution. But as long as society is run on profits and governed by austerity, human-centered solutions will never flourish for the collective. We’ll be stuck fighting over $1,400, or for marginally less predatory healthcare, or for fracking-friendly climate plans. We will be, figuratively but also literally, stuck fighting with a faceless machine, white-knuckling our branded garbage while it takes our money and drives us mad, all in the name of progress.
-
The term “revenge bedtime,” which refers to the decision to stay up late and fuck around (even if you’re tired) in an attempt to recapture leisure time stolen from you by work, chores, and errands.
-
“My Parents Got Sick. It Changed How I Thought About My Marriage,” an essay by Mary H.K. Choi for *GQ *that I went into with no expectations and came away from stunned by its beauty.
-
The definition and cause of “the cat zoomies,” which is when a cat displays sudden bursts of energy, going from napping to dashing wildly fast across the room in just a few seconds, something I have heretofore referred to as “Bug being on one” or “Bug chasing a ghost.”
Bug, pre-zoomies, enjoying his new cat tree, the first thing I’ve bought him that he immediately loved.
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The Ove Glove, the perfect oven mitt purchased by Avi.
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“Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain,” a funny and also moving piece by Ellen Cushing for *The Atlantic *about forgetting how to be normal.
-
The Meghan & Harry Oprah interview of course. I don’t have any vested interest in the royals but I am watching The Crown *right now (season 2) and I wanted to know what everyone was talking about on Twitter. (I also read this follow-up piece in *The New Yorker by Doreen St. Felix.)
-
A frozen French bread pizza, the likes of which I had not eaten in 15 years, and I have to say, it was fucking delicious.
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This New York Times coverage of Dimes Square which felt like possibly the end of Dimes Square? That said I would still smoke a cigarette outside Clandestino tonight if I could…and I don’t even smoke.
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This incredible photo of my dad in a camping bucket hat from the late 70s:
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*Uncanny Valley, *a memoir by Anna Wiener and transporting profile of Silicon Valley and people who run it. It really took me back to working at startups in SF after college.
-
“What If We Pay People to Stop Using Drugs?” an illuminating piece by Zachary Siegel for The New Republic about “contingency management,” a form of behavioral therapy that does not judge and punish people who abuse drugs, but incentivizes sobriety.
“Decades of research show that contingency management works—and is much more effective in treating stimulant use disorders than traditional addiction treatments. But a conservative impulse to punish those who use drugs instead of offering quality care has hardened into policies and laws that prevent contingency management from being more widely used.”
- A roll of film we just got back, featuring photos Avi took of me on the snowy, abandoned beach last month. (In case you missed it: my winter beach ASMR carousel)
-
Once again, the creepy elevator footage of Elisa Lam, which haunted me the first time I saw it. There is currently a show on Netflix about her case, *Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, *which I am definitely watching, although not necessarily recommending…I think it’s bad?
-
“Andrew Cuomo Is Screwed,” by Alex Shephard for The New Republic. I’ve been mad at Cuomo for years, so it’s a relief to see a crack in the public’s bizarre adoration for him, which I don’t believe he ever deserved.
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So…many…apartment listings. And also actual apartments. At this point I myself am just a sentient apartment.
Thanks for reading! This Tuesday it’s time for another round of Pop Quiz, my monthly-ish pop culture roundup on the Maybe Baby podcast. This week I invited some of my regulars on (Avi, Danny, my brother Andy) to discuss everything from Lola Bunny to Justin Bieber to the Meghan & Harry Oprah interview. It’s as chaotic as you’d expect.
Or I’ll just see you next week!
Haley
This month a portion of subscriber proceeds will be redistributed to GlobalGiving Coronavirus Relief Fund, a non-profit focused on equitable vaccine distribution and getting resources to those made especially vulnerable by the pandemic.
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3 stories about artificial intelligence - Austin Kleon
drawing by my son Owen, age 5
- Composer and Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford was asked to respond to the “10th symphony” created with artificial intelligence. “At the end of the symphony I found myself more philosophical than annoyed,” he writes.
The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most… When it comes to art, we need to see a woman or a man struggling with the universal mediocrity that is the natural lot of all of us and somehow out of some mélange of talent, skill, and luck doing the impossible, making something happen that is splendid and moving—or funny, or frightening, or whatever the artist set out to do… Here’s my assertion: True intelligence is in a body. Intelligence outside a living body, as some sort of abstraction, is innately impossible, or should be given another name.
Swafford points out (like Nick Cave has) that part of the beauty of Beethoven is, “in contrast say to Mozart and Bach, with him it’s often as if you can hear the effort, the struggle, hear in the notes what it cost him to rise above the universal mediocrity.”
He writes of his late friend, the painter Francis Gillespie:
She would spend a year or more on a painting of flowers, struggling to represent them with virtually photographic accuracy. In fact, as she knew perfectly well, she didn’t have the technique to do that. “I’m really sort of a primitive,” Fran would say grimly as she worked. But what makes her paintings hers is exactly the grand failure of her attempt. Her pictures are beautiful, close to photos, but always a little off, and the offness makes them singular.
Ted Gioia calls this “an aesthetics of imperfection.”
In this story, the human has something the machine can never have.
- In Sam Anderson’s profile of Laurie Anderson, he notes that the artist has “become obsessed, lately, with artificial intelligence.” She worked with researchers to make text engines in her style, the style of her late husband, Lou Reed, and an Anderson/Reed blend of the two. Anderson says a 1/3 of what the computer spits out is junk, 1/3 is boring, but 1/3 is “surprising, even authentic, some kind of fresh magic.”
Sometimes she sits there with the hunger of an addict, feeding words and pictures into the engine, seeing what comes out. For a long time, she would save the texts. They felt so precious. After a while, though, she realized that the texts were infinite. She could have one whenever she needed it. So she read them and then let them go.
At one point, Laurie Anderson reeds a poem the machine spit out in Reed’s style. It’s not bad. “Wonderful,” she says. “Just great. He’s talking to me from somewhere else. I definitely do feel that. The line is pretty thin for me.”
(This scene reminded me of something out of Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow.)
In this story, the machine gives the human a combination of something it had and something it never had.
another robot by Owen
- I am sympathetic to Swafford’s assertion that “intelligence is in a body” and “the aesthetics of imperfection.”
I also know that some of my favorite art came out of the interplay between human and machine. It is between the two that a third thing emerges — Beethoven, after all, was wrangling notes out of a machine with keys.
I think it is worth noting the difference between analog and digital machines. Analog machines, I would venture, give you more mistakes that you can work with — a brush runs out of ink, and the dry texture gives you new marks, Lee Perry blows ganja smoke and dirt on a tape reel, and new sounds emerge. (You throw dirt in a laptop and you’ll simply fry the machine.) That said, even digital machines and pieces of software have quirks and we ascribe them personalities, and work with them.
I would also note the difference between words and music. Words are more abstract than music. They are more easily fed into a computer and spit back out. They also must be interpreted by us — when we read the poem in the style of Reed, summoned from the computer, it is already an abstract, linear text. We must interpret the words. Music is not interpreted. It is what it is. It is heard.
I confess I have gone from being cranky to curious about A.I., and I wonder what sorts of grunt work it could do for me. (Could it spit out a book proposal?)
In my story, the machines help us to honor what is not machine-like in us.
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: art, artificial intelligence, computers, creativity, imperfection, jan swafford, Laurie anderson, limitations, machines, owen kleon, sam anderson, ted gioia
These are the good ol’ days - Austin Kleon
Old toys at my mom’s house
Hey y’all,
Last weekend I spent a day at my mom’s house sifting through my childhood. Among the artifacts I saved or discarded from the first two decades of my life: a hundred pounds of notebooks and binders from high school, random junk like chem lab aprons I never returned, letters from former girlfriends, bank statements, rental agreements, brochures, ticket stubs, wristbands, notes, old sketchbooks, a stack of song lyrics and guitar tablature several inches thick, tuition statements, computer manuals, hint books, baseball cards, floppy disks, and best of all, toys. A glorious batch of toys from my youth, including He-Man, Ghostbusters, Robo Cop, G.I. Joes, and even one lone Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
“What can I say? Like so many of my generation, He-Man is my Rosebud.” —Box Brown
I had been thinking about these toys ever since I read an advance copy of Box Brown’s comic book, *The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood**. *(It comes out in July, and is available for pre-order. I think it’s his best one yet.)
A major theme Brown writes and draws about is the power of nostalgia. Memories of the past can provide us great feelings of comfort, safety, and meaning, but they can mess with our vision, by both cropping and distorting the way things really happened and blinding us to what’s in front of our eyes in the present. Nostalgia can also be manipulated and used to sell things to us — everything from tickets to Disneyland to presidential tickets to fascism.
A still from the *Mad Men *season one finale, “The Wheel,” aka “The Carousel Pitch”
One of the most powerful depictions of this idea comes at the end of the first season of Mad Men, when ad man Don Draper delivers a brilliant pitch to Kodak executives for a new wheel-like slide projector they’ve developed.
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Don starts off talking about a former mentor of his, a Greek copywriter named Teddy, who taught him that the most important idea in advertising is “new” — you create an itch for something and you satisfy it with your product. But, Don says, Teddy also talked about something deeper: “Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.”
Don then dims the lights, starts the projector, and clicks through happy slides from his own family life. He continues:
Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards … it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called The Wheel, it’s called The Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”
In his brilliant piece about how Mad Men was a show about nostalgia, Andrew Potter pointed out that the subtext gives this scene its real power. ”Don’s carousel pitch is selling a family that doesn’t exist – his character as a drunk, serial philanderer and bad father is already well established.” The scene does what Mad Men on the whole does: it both conjures nostalgia in us by beautifully and painstakingly portraying the past, but it also has a “more pressing agenda to reveal this nostalgia as, essentially, a fraud.”
But is nostalgia always a fraud?
From *The Onion *in 1997: “U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: ‘We May Be Running Out Of Past’”
In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym plays with the word’s roots — nostos, meaning return or homecoming, and algia, meaning pain or longing — echoing Don Draper’s distinction between a spaceship and a time machine:
At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.
Boym continues:
Nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective. Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on the realities of the future. Consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales.
A list of movies I watched when I was nine
It seems to me that nostalgia is just a very powerful human tool — one that can be used for good or for evil.
John Hodgman says he considers nostalgia to be “a toxic impulse.”
But as in many cases of toxicity, the dosage is the poison.
A little dab’ll do you.
In small, personal amounts, nostalgia can be a kind of re-calibration: by dreaming about who we were and where we’ve been, we can both re-connect with our inner spirit and awaken to where we are.
In large, public amounts, we completely retreat from reality, invent a past that never existed, try to re-create it, and destroy anything that gets in our way.
The swim school I take my kids to has the brilliant tagline: “Their golden years are here.” It’s selling a nostalgia for the present, in a sense, in the same way that people say they are “making memories.” But I am happy to be manipulated by it —I choose to believe it, and adopt it as an attitude.
When I asked y’all what words you have pinned to the wall, reader Diane answered, “‘THESE ARE THE GOOD OL’ DAYS’ to remind me that I will be nostalgic for this time eventually and to appreciate it while I’m in it.” (As Patricia Lockwood wrote in No One Is Talking About This: “You’ll be nostalgic for this, too, if you make it.”)
I’m running out of space here, so now I’ll ask you: How do you feel about nostalgia? What’s the best thing you ever read about it? What are you nostalgic for? Tell us in the comments:
xoxo,
Austin
Never waste your midlife crisis - Austin Kleon
I turned 40 last month and spent three weeks reading Don Quixote, so the mid-life crisis has been on my brain.
“Never waste your midlife crisis.”
That’s advice I heard while listening to a podcast interview with John Higgs, author of William Blake vs. The World. (One of my favorite reads of 2022.)
Higgs was saying that the artists he admires are people like David Lynch, “People who you wouldn’t think there’s an obvious place for them in the world, but they just do their stuff regardless, and a place sort of builds around them.”
He continues:
There’s a concept in ecology of ‘niche creation.’ And the idea is: it’s not the case that a species will sort of come along and go, ‘oh, I could do well here, there’s lots of food,’ and things like that. A species comes along and just does his thing, and by acting in the world, he sort of creates the very environment he needs to survive.
“It’s always on an edge of never working out properly,” he admits, but it’s working so far, and it all started when he turned 40 and made the decision to go for it:
You should never waste your midlife crisis. You can do great things with a midlife crisis. If you just waste it on like a car, it’s just a lack of imagination. Mine was the decision to write books and attempt to make a living there.
Loved this. Never waste your midlife crisis.
(I’m currently listening to his book Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche while playing Zelda. He points out that James Bond was basically Ian Fleming’s mid-life crisis.)
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: aging, don quixote, James bond, John higgs, mid-life crisis, midlife crisis
Living for dinnertime - Austin Kleon
The other day I joked to a friend, “I’m just trying to stay alive until dinnertime.”
I have written before about my very simple rule that has served me well: “Don’t think much about your life after dinnertime.”
But this is my new motto: “I’m living for dinnertime!”
I am very “food motivated,” so it’s probably the diet talking, but when things go sideways, I focus on how good it is going to be to have dinner. If I can get to dinner, I’m good.
And once I’ve had dinner, I’m at home and at peace and I don’t care much what happens. I try not to think about my life or my problems until morning, at which point I start living for dinnertime again.
I am reminded of what Clancy Martin writes in How Not to Kill Yourself: “Suicide is indeed a human possibility, but, and somewhat paradoxically, for that very reason, we don’t have to choose it. After all, you can always kill yourself tomorrow.” Wait a day and see how you feel. Repeat ad infinitum.
A little too bleak for me, as I’m not suicidal, so for now I’ll stick with what’s working: “Living for dinnertime!”
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: Clancy martin, days, dieting, dinnertime, food, suicide
Laziness and discipline - Austin Kleon
I have written often of the deep connection I feel between my laziness and my productivity.
Here’s writer Hanif Abdurraqib on The Stephen Satterfield Show, putting it much more poetically, so much so that I thought it was worth transcribing in full:
I came to writing significantly later than most of my peers. I have no ‘formal education’ in writing, I didn’t study writing in college, I wasn’t very good at school. But I always had these obsessions and interests and excitements, particularly around music. And for me that meant that for a long time, because I wasn’t a writer, those things were just building, and I would store them. I kind of have an internal archive of excitements and I did not always have access to a place for them….
Satterfield asks him how somebody can be both lazy and disciplined.
They act in opposition to each other, right?
There’s so much there, and so many phrases I want to clip and build whole pieces out of, like, “an internal archive of excitements” and “joyful extraction.” It’s also impossible for me not to try to read an Ohio thing into it. (Hanif and I were born the same year and grew up about 45 minutes away from each other.)
I also want to join Hanif’s Church Of Minding One’s Own Business. Elsewhere he has said, “My superpower is that I mind my own business. And I actually think that helps my productivity more than anything.”
Filed under: **laziness
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: discipline, hanif abdurraqib, laziness, NOTES ON WRITING AND DRAWING
What to do with your feelings - Austin Kleon
A slide from a talk I gave yesterday
A lot of the questions I get asked during Q&As have to do with the *feelings *and *emotions *around creative work. Questions about fear, imposter syndrome, jealousy, etc.
For years, I dodged, or tried to dodge these questions. “Eh, you just have to work!” “Show up!” While in the back of my mind, I’d be thinking, welcome to the club, friendo, *or worse, *Get over it!
Part of the trouble is that I’m not a particularly feeling person. I write to know what I think, and I make art to actually know what I feel.
I’ve been thinking lately about how many of the feelings and emotions creative people are trying to deal with are just symptoms that they’re, well, human.
In other words: I’d be more worried about you if you weren’t feeling some of these emotions.
Feelings and emotions are a form of information.
“What do you do with the mad that you feel?”
The question is what you *do *with information.
What’s handy, as an artist, is you can find a way to channel these feelings into the making of the work.
Fear, for example, is often just the imagination getting out of control: you can imagine every single thing that can go wrong. But on the flip side, if you can imagine the worst, you can train yourself to imagine the best.
Imposter syndrome is a sign of extreme humility: we know we’re really not that good, especially to the people we look up to and idolize! (“Some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to start.”) But if you turn it the right way, extreme humility is good: it means you can learn to play the fool and learn what you need to know to get to the next thing.
And jealousy, even, though it can eat you up if you let it, can be also tell you what you really want.
People often ask me how I got the courage to put my work into the world.
I’m not sure I have any courage, but I do have rage.
This may come as a surprise to readers of my books, who tell me they’re rather helpful and upbeat. (Not words my friends and family might necessarily use to describe me!)
My secret is: the books are positive because I take a negative approach: First, I see something I feel negatively about, something that aggravates me, something that pisses me off, something that infuriates me, and then I spend some time trying to articulate an alternative vision. (I’m angry, but I’m curious.)
This negative process seems to be infinitely repeatable for someone like me.
Whenever you are out of ideas, there’s someone, somewhere, with bad ideas that need to be corrected. But you don’t necessarily have to talk about the bad ideas, or take them on directly, you can just articulate the good ideas that cancel them out. (See: Identifying poison vs. seeking nourishment.)
A lot of people I know right now are angry or furious or enraged. And rightly so!
“Fatigue and outrage are appropriate emotions,” Sarah Smarsh wrote in a recent op-ed, “What to Do With Our Covid Rage. “But those feelings, if not properly channeled, can themselves take a heavy toll. What do we do with our anger?”
I’ll give the last word to The Clash: “Let fury have the hour / anger can be power / did you know that you can use it?”
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: anger, courage, emotions, fear, feelings, imposter syndrome, jealousy, quarantine, Sarah smarsh
The best thing ever written about “work-life balance” - Austin Kleon
This is one of those poems you tape to the fridge. It ran in the May 18, 1998 issue of the New Yorker. *You can find it in Koch’s *Collected Poems. I love it because unlike many when they talk about “work-life balance,” there’s no value judgment, no correct answer, just Koch laying out the choices. Work, family, or friends: pick two. You can have it all, just not all at once. (Seasons, man.)
I thought of it again today because Jocelyn Glei made a supercut of some of her podcast guests’ answers to the question “What’s the key ingredient in work-life balance?” My answer was included in the batch (something about loving something more than your work, irreverence, ego, blah blah blah) but I wish I’d just recited the Koch.
One thing I did think was interesting: of the six guests, the two men, myself included, didn’t question whether such a thing as “work-life balance” was possible, while two of the women, both friends of mine, said they didn’t really believe in it or think about it — they didn’t see a big distinction between their work and their lives. On the whole, women have, historically, if they were lucky enough to have creative careers at all, not had much of a choice of easily separating work and life. (I think of poor Clara Schumann, raising seven kids as a widower and a performing artist. I mean, damn.)
There’s a great 2008 conversation between Muriel Murch and Eleanor Coppola on Murch’s podcast, Living With Literature**. Coppola talks about the challenges of raising a family and supporting her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, while trying to do find time to do her creative work, too. She says she was always “trying to reconcile these two sides of myself.” She talks about being relieved to start shooting documentary footage on-set during Apocalypse Now *so she had something creative to do with her talents other than go to the grocery and find a dry cleaner. (Read more in her books, *Notes on a Life and Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now.)
At one point, Coppola speaks explicitly about the different ways that men and women (with families) of her generation worked on their art:
The men artists I knew had a studio, and they went out to their studio, and they spent the day, and worked, and then they came back. I once read a book by Judy Chicago, who interviewed all these women artists, and they made their art on the back porch, they made it on top of the washing machine, they made it next to the kitchen sink, and they made it anywhere they could, for the hour and a half while their kid was taking a nap, and for the two hours while they were at the play group. They made it in between. It wasn’t, like, you get to make art for eight hours. You make art in 20-minute snatches, and you don’t, like, fiddle around. I know one time I went to see Francis in his working room, and he had his pencils all laid out, and his espresso there, and there was this whole little ritual of getting into yourself and into your work. There was no time [for women] for the ritual of getting into your work! You just snapped into that taking 10 minutes and making 3 lines on your drawing or whatever was possible. It wasn’t the same as the way men worked. And that’s how women got their work done.
Tillie Olsen, in Silences, writes: “More than any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now… It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interuption, not continuity.” A mother can’t avoid interruptions, so she has to find a way of “scurrying,” as Muriel Murch puts it.
Coppola speaks of having to escape out into the garden, just to “catch a breath” and “hear yourself” and have some time with that creative voice that was speaking to her, and what a terrific luxury it was, later in life, when she was 60, and her kids were gone, and she could have a little studio of her own, outside the house, where she could work uninterrupted. (In spite of all she had to give up, she says she’s thrilled that her children are all good, creative people. “I think they’re my greatest artwork.”)
I am extremely fortunate that my wife stays home with our boys and I have a space of my own out in the garage behind the house where I can escape to work, but, especially now that the boys are older, I am trying to take inspiration from some of these artist/mothers, to counter the “pram in the hall” nonsense, and to not only spend more time with the boys, but to actually bring them into my space here and there and let them work alongside me.
I am heartened by illustrator Dahlov Ipcar’s memoir of her upbringing and thoughts on raising children:
People always ask me how I managed to paint when my two boys were small. My children were a joy to me, and there was no problem working with them around — I just let them play at my feet as I painted. They would even run toy fire engines up and down my easel, but it didn’t bother me.
What is really the issue here is a sense that art and domesticity don’t play nicely together. Here’s Tom Waits:
Family and career don’t like each other. One is always trying to eat the other. You’re always trying to find balance. But one is really useless without the other. What you really want is a sink and a faucet. That’s the ideal.
Maybe family and career *are at odds, but I don’t think family and *art-making absolutely have to be. I take a lot of inspiration from artists deep in domesticity. (Literally: “home or family life.”) From a New Yorker profile of Ursula K. Le Guin:
At a little kitchen table, over tea served in the indestructible handmade earthenware mugs of the seventies, she commented, somewhat defiantly, that she had always taken pleasure in cooking and keeping house. It sounded like criticism of the heroic writer, alone in his garret, but there’s more to it than that. She feels that marriage and family have given her a stability that supported her writing—the freedom of solitude within the solidity of household life. “An artist can go off into the private world they create, and maybe not be so good at finding the way out again,” she told me. “This could be one reason I’ve always been grateful for having a family and doing housework, and the stupid ordinary stuff that has to be done that you cannot let go.”
In the documentary Look & See, Wendell Berry talks about how he thinks art-making is actually given meaning by interruption. Here’s writer Winn Collier’s recollection of a discussion with Berry on the topic:
You have been given a gift to help you resist the temptation to believe that your writing must never be interrupted. The modern idea that our art must always come first and never be interrupted is complete BS. I can’t live that way with my land. When you have a mule and it needs something, you can’t tell it to wait. I can’t tell Tanya to wait. I couldn’t tell my kids to wait, I still can’t most times. I can’t help but be interrupted by my neighbor. Now, I have some ways of being unfindable when I have to be, but I’m going to be interrupted.
About 10 years ago, I clipped this bit from an interview with cartoonist James Kochalka, who documented his life with his young family in American Elf:
Here’s what I’m trying to do with my life and my work. I’m trying to fully integrate everything. So the transition from work to play to everyday life is all seamless. So that it’s all one thing. There’s no difference between living and making art. I’ve gotten really close. Music, comics, writing, painting, playing with Eli, doing dishes, cooking, all that, fully integrated into one seamless unit. That’s pretty much my goal…
The writer L.P. Jacks might’ve said Kochalka is on to something. He wrote in his 1932 book, Education Through Recreation:
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
It’s not going to happen for everybody, of course. In the end, you get away with whatever you can get away with. You live however you need to.
I really did not mean to write so much in this post, but I wanted to wrap up with this story from the late Amy Krouse Rosenthal, a great writer and mother of three, who put “You Want A Social Life With Friends” in her book, *Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life**, *and met Kenneth Koch:
In the fall of 2000, I had the privilege of recording Mr. Koch reading this poem in his Upper East Side apartment for an audio magazine project I was working on. I used a tiny Radio Shack tape recorder, and take full responsibility for the lack of high sound quality. (But I do admit I like the crackling and soundproof-lessness.) He was an impeccable, flawless reader–we were finished in two or three takes. Though he had been reluctant to agree to our session, once underway, he was a gracious, charismatic host. He had set up a nice tray with glasses of grapefruit juice. Fitting, because the whole thing was bittersweet. Mr. Koch died a year later. I believe this is one of his last recordings.
Here’s the recording:
Explore or exploit? - Austin Kleon
Thursday, November 11, 2021
A diary diagram (with The Creative Learning Spiral in the middle)
In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson reports on research into what causes “hot streaks” in careers. (Some personal favorites, off the top of my head: Al Green 1971-1974, Robert Louis Stevenson 1884-1886, Harrison Ford 1979-1989, etc.)
“It’s a complicated idea that comes down to three words,” Thompson writes. “Explore, then exploit.”
There’s a never-ending tension in creative work between “exploring new ideas and exploiting old certainties.”
Say you’re a car manufacturer. Every year, you must decide between investing in future innovations, such as self-driving software, and finding ways to squeeze new revenue out of existing technologies and materials. Too much fanciful R&D spending, and this year’s profit plummets. Too much emphasis on tweaking existing product lines, and you get squashed by some fresh upstart in a decade.
Thompson notes that the same tension exists on the individual level: Do you spend your time exploring new possibilities or do you “shut up and play the hits,” so to speak?
Thompson’s piece notes that the “explore, then exploit” theory seems to back up the main idea of David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. David responded in his newsletter, “Exploration is Key for a ‘Hot Streak’ at Work,” and told the story of what happened when his first book, The Sports Gene, became a surprise bestseller.
I felt like the book was my sports capstone project: the exploit of my years as SI’s science writer. I wanted to go back into explore mode. Except, suddenly there was a lot of pressure not to do that, and instead to brand myself as the sports science guy and write another, similar book, and quickly. The pressure was to keep exploiting.
Maybe! But choosing to be an idiot for six years, or playing the fool, led David to the “most impactful work” of his career.
Heraclitus noted that, like with guitar strings, it’s the unique tension in life that creates harmony.
I see this tension between exploring and exploiting not as something to get over or beat, but as a kind of field from which our work emerges.
If an artist is to keep working, they will never resolve this tension, nor will they want to. (See: Milton Glaser on Picasso.)
I have a few more thoughts:
1. A “hot streak” can’t be due to the will or actions of the artist alone.
When I look at the hot streaks listed by Thompson (“Albert Einstein in the early 1900s. Aretha Franklin in the 1960s. Steve Jobs in the 2000s.”) and the ones I listed above, I can point to the sceniuses that gave birth to those particular “hot streaks,” or acts of genius. (Green and Franklin did their best work at the peak of the album industry, Ford was there at the birth of the blockbuster, etc.)
In order for artistic or creative work to be “impactful” the conditions must be right. There must be an audience ready to receive the work. The creative person has very little to do with that.
Perhaps the best way to know if it’s time to explore is if the conditions don’t seem ripe. In such winter-like moments, it may be best to disappear and explore. (Read, for example, about the career of the late actor Dean Stockwell, which is a story of working and disappearing and reappearing again.)
My favorite sentence in Thompson’s piece echoes my thoughts on wintering and dormancy: “Periods of exploration can be like winter farming; nothing is visibly growing, but a subterranean process is at work and will in time yield a bounty.”
2. Does “impactful work” really equate to the best work?
I’m always a bit suspicious of the metrics involved in such studies. For this one, the hot streaks were “determined by higher-than-average art-auction prices, IMDb film ratings, or scientific-journal citations.”
I can tell you that in my own career, my most impactful or “successful” work is not my favorite work, nor the work I think is best. It is merely the work that connected the most with others. (Caveat: artists are often the worst judges of their own work.)
4. The line between exploitation and exploration can be pretty blurry.
Take Prince, for example. He had one of the hottest hot streaks of all time at the end oof the seventies and throughout the eighties. But he covered so much territory in that time, made such a diverse range of good music, can you say he was primarily in an exploitation mode? (To be fair, his commercial peak, Purple Rain, was a calculated move to become a superstar…)
5. Is a “hot streak” desirable for the artist?
That which burns hottest burns out more quickly. A hot streak is hard to live up to, though you can warm yourself by its embers for quite a long while. Which brings me to my next thought…
6. Exploration needs to be funded.
Exploitation mode pays for itself (until it doesn’t) but the exploration mode needs to be paid for up until it pays off. (If it ever does.) One of the great gifts of a major success is that it means you can go away for a while and experiment… if you have the guts to turn your back on the temptation to exploit indefinitely. (See David’s story above.)
7. There’s a micro and macro view of this.
If you zoom in, it’s possible you can do your exploiting and exploration at the same time. I think of John Waters: “I think it up in the morning and I sell it in the afternoon.”
Doing a gig based on what I know in the morning, for example, pays for my afternoon of writing and reading about what I don’t know.
Musicians tour so they can stay home to write and record. George Clooney acts in a big mainstream movie so he can direct an indie one. Etc.
8. Explore and exploit map to the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
As laid out in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary and Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess**, *the left hemisphere tends to be all about exploitation and *what it already knows for certain and the right brain about exploration and what is new. Chaos ensues when the left hemisphere gets its way too much, as it also does when exploitation becomes the main mode of the wider culture.
9. The playfulness of children can help us break out of exploit mode and back into explore mode.
See: Alison Gopnik’s writing on the subject:
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: career, David epstein, Derek thompson, explore and exploit, work
A state of flow - Austin Kleon
Thursday, October 21, 2021
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has died.
Earlier this year my 8-year-old said, “When you’re making video games, you have to find that perfect balance between easy and hard?” And I told him he’d basically summarized Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, and drew him the diagram above to explain.
Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience was a big influence on me when I read it back in 2007. There’s a passage in that book about crossword puzzles that I thought could also be describing my newspaper blackout poems:
There is much to be said in favor of this popular pastime, which in its best form resembles the ancient riddle contests. It is inexpensive and portable, its challenges can be finely graduated so that both novices and experts can enjoy it, and its solution produces a sense of pleasing order that gives one a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. It provides opportunities to experience a mild state of flow to many people who are stranded in airport lounges, who travel on commuter trains, or who are simply whiling away Sunday mornings.
Csikszentmihalyi then goes on to talk explicitly about poetry and writing:
What’s important is to find at least a line, or a verse, that starts to sing. Sometimes even one word is enough to open a window on a new view of the world, to start the mind on an inner journey….
He also wrote about the joys of being an amateur:
Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet….Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully little) out of writing, it’s considered to be a waste of time. It is taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it.
(I wrote more on the subject in Show Your Work!)
Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk, “Flow, the secret to happiness”
Csikszentmihalyi also wrote a book called Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and he made an interesting list of “paradoxical traits” of creative people:
- Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
RIP.
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychology
The ones who disappear
“Fame in a world like this is worthless.”
—Marcus Aurelius, 121-180 A.D.
“Fame is hollow. It amplifies what is there. If there is any self-doubt, or hatred, or lack of ability to connect with people, fame will magnify it.”
—Alanis Morissette
“There’s nothing about fame that I’ve ever seen that is healthy…it’s very hard to survive.”
—Shep Gordon
“In many ways, fame is the industrial disease of creativity. It’s a sludgy byproduct of making things.”
—Mike Myers
“Last summer, I read a book by David Bohm, the physicist, called *Order, Science, and Creativity. *They gave chimps paint and found that they’d rather paint than do anything else, they even forgot to eat. The only thing that stemmed the flow of the hated word, “creativity,” was when they began to reward them for painting. I have seen in my life again and again what fame does to people…”
—Hedda Sterne
“How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”
—Emily Dickinson
“One can’t work
by lime light…”
“The only thing that comes from fame is mediocrity.”
—Sleater-Kinney, “Hey Darling”
“The secret to longevity in the music business is to get away from it. Alright? You gotta leave it man… Learn how to be a deep sea fisherman. Go scuba diving. Whatever it is. Snow skiing. Become, and be, something completely else.”
—Sam Cutler
One celebrity I actually admire is Rick Moranis, who took a break from acting to raise his children after his wife died of breast cancer. “I discovered within a couple of years, I didn’t miss it at all,” he said. He explained that once he became a star, the real creative element of the work went out the window:
And once I became a commodity for hire, and was asked to be in other people’s movies, it stopped being about the creativity, the writing, and it became more about being a marketable entity. I guess what they call a star. Hitting the mark and saying the lines and doing the work that the scriptwriters and executives and the director wanted the actor to do, was perfectly acceptable way to spend time and make a living, but it was not fulfilling creatively, the way the early work had been. I knew as I was taking a break from it that if I went back to it, I was not going to go back to it in that way. If I ever went back, I’d go back to it in a much more creative way.
(He’s still around, by the way.)
I’m also reminded of John Lennon, who is more problematic, as we say. From 1973-1975, John Lennon lived what is known as “The Lost Weekend,” a period in which he separated from his wife, Yoko Ono, and spent his time drinking and running around with Harry Nilsson. The story goes that when they eventually got back together, Yoko got pregnant, but since she’d suffered several previous miscarriages, she said the only way she’d have the child is if Lennon agreed to be a “househusband.” He accepted, and from 1975-1980, they switched roles: Yoko tended to their business deals and Lennon stayed at home with their new son, Sean.
In a 1980 Playboy interview, when asked what he’d been doing, he answered, “I’ve been baking bread and looking after the baby.” The interviewer asked, “But what have you been working on?” to which Lennon replied, “Are you kidding? Bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job.”
Lennon wrote the song “Watching The Wheels” about this period away from fame:
People say I’m crazy
In his later years, Lennon struggled with the notion of churning out rock ‘n’ roll product, so his househusband era was also a kind of retreat and sabbatical from the meat grinder. “Rock ‘n’ roll was not fun anymore…I had become a craftsman and I could have continued being a craftsman. I respect craftsmen, but I am not interested in becoming one.”
“I chose not to take the standard options in my business – going to Vegas and singing your great hits, if you’re lucky, or going to hell, which is where Elvis went,” he said. “Walking away is much harder than carrying on.”
I am no longer weakened by the weekend - Austin Kleon
“The Leisure Suite,” collage, 2021
I spent Sunday afternoon reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath. Published in 1951, the book explores the Jewish faith’s unique relationship to time and the meaning of the Hebrew god’s blessing of the seventh day in the book of Exodus, 20:8-11:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
“Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space,” the rabbi starts. “We expend time to gain space.” But things go wrong, Heschel writes, when space becomes our only concern. We become so occupied with objects, with things, or nouns, that reality is a “thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing.”
The Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, is “more concerned with time than with space.”
Judaism is a
“The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals,” Heschel writes. “Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.” The meaning of the Sabbath is “to celebrate time rather than space,” and to get out from “under the tyranny of things of space.” The Sabbath is a time in which you not only abstain from work, you don’t even think about work. Each Sabbath is a kind of a mini-eternity — something to look forward to.
I came to The Sabbath via artist coach Beth Pickens’ new book, Make Your Art No Matter What. Pickens uses the concept of Shabbat with all the artists she works with, regardless of their religious background: “I ask them to choose a twenty-four-hour period every week from which they abstain from any work that could lead to making money, including their art.” Many of her clients balk at this suggestion. “They want *more *time for their art and here I am asking them to do none of it for a whole precious day each week.”
But these artists often find that — surprise! — taking a day off from their work restores their spirit and energy. There’s a balance here, of course, as Pickens defines an artist as a person who makes art, but also someone whose life suffers when they’re away from their creative practice. A real day off is usually more than enough to have us chomping at the bit to get back to the studio. (Just a few days ago I heard cartoonist Adrian Tomine say he takes one day off and he’s ready to start a new project.)
Personally, I have started focusing on having good, old-fashioned week-ends. In the Before Times, I felt the pressure to stuff weekends full of activity, the same pressure Witold Rybczynski describes so well in his great book, Waiting for the Weekend**:
We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it, too.
Worst of all, my boss, (me), was a complete asshole, and often asked me to work at weird hours, even on Sundays. At a certain point, I started to despise weekends — I called them “Weak Ends” and joked that I was “weakened by the weekend.”
The pandemic has made me actually enjoy my weekends: I have nowhere to go, no traffic to fight, no lines to wait in for brunch, no crowds at museums. My kids are always home, so the school week provides no relief in the form of daycare. The week-end, however, means that nobody outside the house really expects anything from me. I don’t have to answer my email. Everything can wait until Monday.
Best of all, and perhaps the most crucial point: I’ve started abstaining from Twitter and social media on Saturday and Sunday. (As Pickens writes: “This wasn’t in the Talmud, but most certainly would have been: Put down your fucking phone.”)
My weekends are now about real rest and idleness.
It helps that my week sort of climaxes with the Friday morning newsletter. Once that’s out, I spend Friday clearing the decks, cleaning my office, answering letters and email, and winding down. The weekend begins with Friday night pizza and a movie with the boys.
Saturday morning, I still got up pretty early, and I still wrote in my diary, but afterwards, I just puttered around, read books, played piano, went for a walk, messed around in the yard, etc. My eight-year-old and I finally watched Star Wars and chased it with some Donkey Kong. Sunday, I read the paper and called my mom and laid in a hammock and read while the boys got their screen time.
It’s a strange feeling… I am no longer weakened by the weekend!
my notes from Witold Rybczynski’s Waiting For The Weekend
Artists must be allowed to make bad work - Austin Kleon
Here is a clip of the art critic David Sylvester in 1969 on the BBC show The Visual Scene (the “Playing it Cool” episode) talking about the dangers of artists working too much in the public eye:
Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative.
This clip went viral on @davidrisley’s Instagram, obviously speaking to the pressures that many artists feel with the rise of social media.
Viewed in the context of the episode, Sylvester is talking, specifically, about the “professionalization” and “commercialization” of art, and basically the hype machine of the art world:
There is a tendency in our society to be wedded to the new, to be wedded to the excitement of novelty. I think at the present moment that there’s a tendency — which I think we’ve got from America, and which I think is a bad tendency, to measure every artist by his last exhibition. “So and so’s no good, look at his last show!” The fact that he had five previous shows, which were very good, doesn’t seem to matter. It gets forgotten too quickly. And somehow the snap judgement on what one has just done, this kind of pressure it puts on is very dangerous, because artists must be allowed to go through bad periods…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtqNZQsnN2A
On a side note: Many people told me this clip was probably one of Sylvester’s interviews with the painter Francis Bacon, specifically, Francis Bacon: Fragments of a Portrait. I watched the whole thing trying to find the clip, with no luck, but I don’t regret it, as the interview is excellent. (John Berger quotes from it in his essay, “Francis Bacon and Walt Disney,” collected in About Looking.) I’m now going to watch Sylvester and Bacon’s 1985 interview together, Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact.)
Filed under: bad art
Filed Under: Miscellany
Anyone who survived childhood - Austin Kleon
This picket sign reminded me of one of my favorite cartoons by Alex Gregory and Flannery O’Connor in Mystery and Manners:
The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.
Some vegetarians say they won’t eat anything with a face — maybe I’ll say I won’t read anything that didn’t have a childhood.
Your API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Background
When an user directs their web browser to an HTTP URL, it’s a common practice for the service to redirect the request to a corresponding HTTPS page. This unencrypted part of the communication flow has its flaws. Third parties in shared networks, as well as network intermediaries, could sniff passwords and other secrets from the initial HTTP traffic or even impersonate the web server with a MITM attack. Nevertheless, redirection has been an useful first step in the transition from the largely unencrypted early web to the largely encrypted web of today.
Later techniques tightened the security story further. Servers can now send HSTS along with the initial HTTP-to-HTTPS redirection response, telling the user’s browser to use only HTTPS for that domain from then on. This limits the window of opportunity for trivial sniffing and MITM attacks to the first request. Browsers then added HSTS preload lists and HTTPS-Only modes that allow skipping the initial unencrypted request altogether.
From the perspective of usability-security tradeoff it all makes sense for user-facing sites. But interestingly, the redirection approach also appears to be widely adopted for APIs. APIs are mostly consumed by other software so the same usability arguments don’t apply there. Moreover, many programmatic API clients don’t tend to keep browser-like state of things like HSTS headers they have seen.
This post argues that, due to these factors, the common practice of redirecting API calls from HTTP to HTTPS should be reconsidered. While the post mostly refers to REST APIs, its points also apply to other styles of APIs that use HTTP(S) as a transport mechanism.
A Simple Typo Is Enugh
At work, we were building a new integration against a third-party API. The initial code commit contained a mistyped API base URL "http://..." instead of "https://...". A pretty easy mistake to make.
The error was essentially masked during runtime: The third-party API responded to every request with a 301 redirect to their HTTPS side. Node.js’s built-in fetch happily and quietly followed those redirects to the HTTPS endpoint.
Every single one of our API requests now sent the API keys over the network in plaintext, before then sending them again to the encrypted endpoint. The one letter omission could have exposed the used API keys to third parties without us realizing it. As the integration would have worked, there’s a good chance that code would have leaked any secrets in the API calls for years. In the long run, the probabilities for malice tend to accumulate.
Luckily we spotted the error during the code review before the error could propagate to production or even testing. We also realized that our own API also did similar HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects.
The Fail-fast Principle
When an API redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS - and the API client silently follows those redirects - it tends to hide mistyped URLs like in the case described above. A simple one-letter omission can easily be ignored, end up in production, and compromise the entire system’s confidentiality.
In most cases, it’s better to adhere to the fail-fast principle: unencrypted API calls should fail in a spectacular and visible way so that the developer can easily spot and fix the typo as early as possible during the development process.
A great solution for failing fast would be to disable the API server’s HTTP interface altogether and not even answer to connections attempts to port 80. If the initial unencrypted connection is never established then the API keys aren’t sent, mitigating sniffing attacks and limiting the window of opportunity for MITM attacks to an extremely small time window. This approach is viable for APIs hosted under their own domains like api.example.com.
Our own API was served under the /api path on the same domain as our service’s web UI. As such we didn’t feel confident completely disabling the HTTP interface, so we picked the second option: All unencrypted HTTP requests made under /api path now return a descriptive error message along with the HTTP status code 403. Some initial plaintext requests might be made during development, but they’re much easier for developers to notice.
After the initial publication of this post, Hacker News user u/zepton made a great point:
The Stack Exchange API used to revoke API keys sent over HTTP (and return an error message), which is my favorite way to handle this.
Indeed! Any API keys sent unencrypted over the public internet should be considered compromised and get automatically revoked on the spot. An error message in the API response is a great place to inform the API consumer both to fix their URL and get new keys after that.
Who Else?
That took care of our own API. We also pinged the third-party API provider and a couple of friends that they might want to check their APIs. And who knows, maybe there were some commonly used APIs that accept API keys (or other credentials) and also redirect from HTTP to HTTPS?
I listed a bunch of well-known APIs from the top of my head and did a little survey. Several of them returned HTTP errors or declined to connections altogether. They’re listed here with cURL spells for checking out their detailed responses:
-
Stripe API: Responds with 403 (“Forbidden”) and a descriptive error message.
curl -i http://api.stripe.com -
Google Cloud API: Responds with 403 and a descriptive error message.
curl -i http://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/project/regions/region/addresses -
Shopify API: Responds with 403 and a descriptive error message.
curl -i http://shop.myshopify.com/admin/api/2021-07/shop.json -
NPM Registry API: Responds with 426 (“Upgrade Required”) and a descriptive error message.
curl -i -X PUT -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{}' 'http://registry.npmjs.org/-/user/org.couchdb.user:npm' -
Fastmail JMAP API: The whole HTTP interface seems to be disabled.
curl -i -H 'Authorization: Bearer foo' http://api.fastmail.com/jmap/session -
Mailjet: The socket responds with completely empty payload.
curl -i -X POST --user "user:pass" http://api.mailjet.com/v3.1/send -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{}'
However, the following APIs did respond with HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects:
-
ActiveCampaign API
curl -i -H "Api-Token: 123abc-def-ghi" http://123456demo.api-us1.com/api/3/accounts -
Atlassian Jira REST API
curl -i http://jira.atlassian.com/rest/api/latest/issue/JRA-9 -
Anthropic API — Updated on 2024-05-31 to return errors and suggest rolling API keys.
curl -i http://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages --header "x-api-key: 1" --header "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" --header "content-type: application/json" --data '{}' -
Auth0
curl -i 'http://login.auth0.com/api/v2/organizations' -H 'Accept: application/json' -H 'Authorization: Bearer foo' -
Cloudflare API
curl -i http://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/abf9b32d38c5f572afde3336ec0ce302/rulesets -
Datadog
curl -i http://api.datadoghq.com/api/v2/integration/gcp/accounts -
Deno Subhosting API
curl -i http://api.deno.com/v1/organizations/11111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555/projects -
DigitalOcean
curl -i -X GET "http://api.digitalocean.com/v2/actions" -H "Authorization: Bearer foo" -
Facebook Graph API
curl -i 'http://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=foo' -
Fastly API
curl -i -H "Fastly-Key: foo" "http://api.fastly.com/current_customer" -
Figma API
curl -i -H 'X-FIGMA-TOKEN: 123' 'http://api.figma.com/v1/me' -
GitHub API
curl -i http://api.github.com/user -
GitLab API
curl -i http://gitlab.com/api/v4/audit_events -
HackerOne API
curl -i "http://api.hackerone.com/v1/me/organizations" -X GET -u "user:token" -H 'Accept: application/json' -
Hetzner Cloud API
curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer 123" "http://api.hetzner.cloud/v1/certificates" -
Hubspot API
curl -i --request GET --url http://api.hubapi.com/account-info/v3/api-usage/daily/private-apps --header 'authorization: Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN' -
IBM Cloud API
curl -i "http://iam.cloud.ibm.com/identity/token" -d "apikey=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE&grant_type=urn%3Aibm%3Aparams%3Aoauth%3Agrant-type%3Aapikey" -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" -H "Authorization: Basic Yng6Yng=" -
Instagram Basic Display API
curl -i 'http://graph.instagram.com/me/media?fields=id,caption&access_token=foo' -
Linear API
curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://api.linear.app/graphql -
Mastodon API (on mastodon.social)
curl -i http://mastodon.social/api/v1/timelines/home -
Microsoft Graph API
curl -i http://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages -
Netlify API
curl -i -H "User-Agent: foo" -H "Authorization: Bearer foo" http://api.netlify.com/api/v1/sites -
OpenAI API — Updated on 2024-05-28 to return errors.
curl -i -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer 123" -d '{}' http://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions -
OVHCloud API
curl -i http://api.us.ovhcloud.com/1.0/auth/details -
Resend
curl -i -X GET 'http://api.resend.com/domains' -H 'Authorization: Bearer re_123456789' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -
Shodan API
curl -i 'http://api.shodan.io/org?key=12345' -
Slack API
curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://slack.com/api/conversations.create -
Tailscale API - Updated on 2024-06-26 to return errors, automatically revoke API keys sent over HTTP and notify Tailnet security owners. For further details see their security bulletin.
curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer tskey-api-xxxxx" http://api.tailscale.com/api/v2/user-invites/1 - Twitter
curl -i http://api.twitter.com/2/users/by/username/jack -
Uber API
curl -i -F client_secret=1 -F client_id=1 -F grant_type=authorization_code -F redirect_uri=1 -F code=1 http://auth.uber.com/oauth/v2/token -
UpCloud API
curl -i -H 'Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ=' http://api.upcloud.com/1.3/account -
Vercel API
curl -i -H 'Authorization: Bearer foo' http://api.vercel.com/v5/user/tokens/5d9f2ebd38ddca62e5d51e9c1704c72530bdc8bfdd41e782a6687c48399e8391 -
Vultr API
curl -i "http://api.vultr.com/v2/account" -H "Authorization: Bearer 123"
I didn’t report these findings separately to all of these API providers. There were some outliers not listed here that I did contact, with varying results. More on that later.
Take each individual result with a grain of salt: I had to test some of these APIs without valid credentials, or with credentials used in documentation examples. But the overall pattern indicates that the habit of APIs redirecting HTTP requests to HTTPS is quite widespread. Why is that?
Best Practices Need Practice Too
When speaking with people about this topic, many have noted that HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects from APIs have obvious downsides - in hindsight.
Redirects for user-facing applications are often mentioned in lists best practices and cheat sheets, like the ones published by OWASP (The Open Worldwide Application Security Project). Recommendations specifically aimed for APIs seem rare in contrast. I found just few mentions, for example an excellent PDF slideset called “Common API Security Pitfalls” by Philippe De Ryck, buried deep within the OWASP website:
Slide 8 of “Common API Security Pitfalls”. Emphasis added to highlight the relevant section.
My Google-fu might just be bad. But maybe each best practice item recommending HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects for user-facing sites should have an explicit caveat attached, prominently advising against such redirects for APIs. Therefore I opened an issue that suggests amending OWASP’s Transport Layer Security Cheat Sheet accordingly.
Bonus Round: Popular APIs That Respond In Plaintext
While reviewing the list of APIs, I bumped into some popular ones that neither redirected nor failed unencrypted requests. They just responded to unencrypted HTTP requests with unencrypted HTTP responses, without enforcing HTTPS at any stage.
Maybe they had their reasons, or maybe they had just accidentally misconfigured their reverse proxies. Regardless, seeing that they all handle potentially sensitive data, I contacted these API providers through their respective security channels and explained the problem. Their responses are listed below.
-
Amazon Web Services (AWS): Some of their APIs, for example the EC2 and SNS APIs, respond in plaintext to unecrypted requests. Reported on 2024-05-17 to AWS Security.
Also notified them that their official documentation contains at least one example using an HTTP URL.
A screenshot of the AWS documentation page “Using temporary security credentials with Amazon SNS”, retrieved on 2024-07-01. Emphasis added to highlight the relevant section.
After an investigation the AWS Security team confirmed the behavior on 2024-06-28. They concluded that usage of HTTP to access EC2 endpoints and other AWS services is widespread, so blocking HTTP without notice would be detrimental to AWS customers. They stated that they will eventually remove HTTP support across AWS, and that in the meantime they will be updating the EC2 documentation to encourage the use of the aws:SecureTransport global IAM condition key.
-
Mailchimp Transactional API: Reported on 2024-05-21 through their HackerOne program. The API responds in plaintext to requests like for example this:
` curl -i -X POST http://mandrillapp.com/api/1.0/users/info -d “{"key":"$API_KEY"}” `
Got a prompt triage response stating that attacks requiring MITM (or physical access to a user’s device) are outside the scope of the program. Sent back a response explaining that MITM or physical access was not required for sniffing. They responded on 2024-06-12 that they are already aware of the issue and in the process of rolling out a fix within the next couple of weeks.
-
Mailgun API: Reported on 2024-05-21 through their product security email address. The API responds in plaintext to requests like the following:
` curl -i –user “api:$API_KEY” http://api.eu.mailgun.net/v4/domains `
Pinged them again on 2024-06-03. No response as of 2024-07-01.
-
VirusTotal API: Reported on 2024-05-21 through Google’s Bug Hunters site (VirusTotal is owned by a Google subsidiary that got merged into Google Cloud). The API responds in plaintext to requests like for example this:
` curl -i -H “x-apikey: $API_KEY” http://www.virustotal.com/api/v3/ip_addresses/1.1.1.1 `
The report got promptly triaged. Received a response on 2024-05-24, cited in part below:
We’ve decided that the issue you reported is not severe enough for us to track it as a security bug. When we file a security vulnerability to product teams, we impose monitoring and escalation processes for teams to follow, and the security risk described in this report does not meet the threshold that we require for this type of escalation on behalf of the security team.
Conclusion
Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS for APIs can be more harmful than helpful due to the nature of APIs. Unlike user-facing web pages, APIs are primarily consumed by other software. API clients often follow redirects automatically and do not maintain state or support security headers like HSTS. This can lead to silent failures where sensitive data in each API request is initially transmitted in plaintext over the network, unencrypted.
Let’s adopt a fail-fast approach and disable the HTTP interface entirely or return clear error responses for unencrypted requests. This ensures that developers can quickly notice and fix accidental http:// URLs to https://. We should consider API credentials sent over unencrypted connections compromised and revoke them on the spot, automatically.
Several well-known and popular APIs did redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS at the time of writing this post. This behavior seems to be widespread. Maybe it’s time we amend best practices to explicitly recommend that APIs flat out refuse to handle unencrypted requests.
Huge thanks to Juhani Eronen (NCSC-FI) and Marko Laakso (OUSPG) for their help and guidance during writing this post.
Lego Art Remix
Below is a recording of my tech talk from BrickCon 2021
If you’re interested in understanding how this site works, the talk goes over the techniques and algorithms that were used
It also goes over some ideas that haven’t (yet) been implemented within the tool, so it functions fairly well as a more general overview of the Lego mosaic space
You can find the slide deck used in the talk here (with some updates since the talk), and if the video doesn’t load, you can find it directly on BrickCon’s YouTube channel here
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These are some other articles and videos featuring Lego Art Remix
Some are quite interesting even outside the context of this tool in particular, since they go into the history of Lego mosaics
Note that some were made when the tool was older
- #LegoArtRemix on Instagram
- Brothers Brick Article (2020 Top 3 most popular feature)
What is it?
In 2020, The Lego Group released the Lego Art theme, which allows people to create a predetermined image using lego studs.
Lego Art Remix lets you upload your own image, and then uses computer vision to use the studs from a Lego Art set that you already have to recreate the image.
This project is not affiliated with The Lego Group
Performance and Security
The computer vision techniques used are pretty inexpensive (with the exception of optional depth map generation), and the resolutions being dealt with are naturally quite low, so as of the time of writing, the algorithm runs quite quickly. This allows for it to be run on the client, and on the machines that I tested, it ran in near real time.
The most computationally expensive part of the process, apart from depth map generation, is generating the instructions, since even pdf generation is done client side.
Since it runs almost entirely within the browser (see the source code), no image data is sent to a server and so it’s very secure. This also makes it much easier for me to maintain and host. The only server code consists of simple increments to anonymously estimate usage for the purposes for tracking performance in case the static deployment needs to be scaled up, and for the counter in the about section.
Even the deep neural network to compute depth maps is being run entirely within the browser, in a web worker, using a modified version of ONNX.js. I’ve compiled a version of the library based on this pull request, with a small additional change I made to support the resize operation in v10. The model used is MiDaS - more specifically, the small ONNX version which can be found here.
Citation for Model Used Ranftl, René, Katrin Lasinger, David Hafner, Konrad Schindler, and Vladlen Koltun. “Towards robust monocular depth estimation: Mixing datasets for zero-shot cross-dataset transfer.” (2020). IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Bugs, Feature Requests, and Algorithm Improvements
Direct any concerns or ideas for improvements **here
As of the time of writing, I don’t have all of the sets, and I haven’t had much time to test. As a result, there’s probably a few bugs, so let me know if you find any.
Algorithm improvement ideas are always welcome. Improvements that maintain the efficiency to within a reasonable degree would allow the algorithm to keep running on the client, which I really like.
Why I built this | Louis Pereira
Nicheless is a micro-blogging platform for raw, unfiltered thoughts.
Because writing is thinking.
And thinking is good.
The No Symbol: The History Of The Red Circle-Slash
Circles And Slashes
Today in Tedium: Recently, I heard someone talking about the red circle and slash, and it made me realize something—how little we actually talk about the red circle and slash, one of the most obvious symbols around. It’s used for all sorts of use cases. If you search the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s trademark archive, you will find all sorts of cheesy or weird logos that reference this simple tool of negation and prohibition. It is literally the easiest way to add visual language to something else that already exists, and turn it into a logo or bumper sticker. And the reason is, simply put, that it’s well understood. Does it have a name? A purpose? Did someone specifically invent it? How did it become so common, and why is it so clear what it means, despite the fact that seemingly nobody talks about it? Today’s Tedium considers the unusually common red circle and slash. — Ernie @ Tedium
Sponsored By CleanMyPhone
— Greg Graffin, the lead vocalist of Bad Religion and an evolutionary biologist, writing in his memoir, Punk Paradox, about his band’s decision to use the circle-backslash symbol around a Christian cross, which was a simple, evocative logo for the band.
/uploads/No-Smoking-Sign.jpg)
No Smoking Sign
When I thought about the red-circle slash, which is meant to signify that something is off limits, my first thought was of its journey to the popular lexicon. It is a very simple sign, but it is also distinct from putting a red X on top of something, as one might have seen in the past.
So I looked around, and realized I had a problem: This is such a well-known, broadly used symbol that it can be hard to describe by the layperson. And because so few people think of such things, I only found a few people pondering what we should actually call this thing.
I was not the first person to face this problem. Back in 2016, teacher and syndicated columnist Rob Kyff, writing in the Hartford Courant, was drawn to the same question I was when he spotted this description of the issue:
Everyone in the room, and everyone reading this article, knows the symbol implied by this passage. It is an extremely simple symbol, perhaps one of the simplest you will find. So the fact that a whole 12 words are required to describe this to a general audience in a newspaper, one of which evokes a popular movie, seems wasteful and unnecessary.
Kyff said his journey proved futile. “Some phrases, such as ‘no symbol’ and ‘no circle,’ have other meanings, and some, such as ‘circle slash,’ don’t show up at all,” he noted.
Making this even more complicated is the symbol’s ubiquity. It shows up in numerous forms, and is so common that people use it in images that they trademark. In terms of its ubiquity, it is probably up there with the traffic light and the stop sign, two things that we know how to describe.
And it appears to have the same roots as both of those objects, which were created for traffic purposes. A Detroit police sergeant, Harry Jackson, gets the credit for the stop sign’s distinctive octagon, according to the 1949 guide “This Terrible Traffic Problem,” though he had financial support from the Michigan Auto Club. The 1949 document, developed by the Traffic Society Association of Detroit, described how controversial the signs actually were. (Sample phrase: “Others seemed to think it was an invasion of a driver’s liberty.” Wonder where you’ve heard that kind of phrasing before.)
Meanwhile, the electric traffic light, as we think of it today, was developed by Lester Wire (great name) of Salt Lake City, Utah, while we later saw three-signal versions developed by Garrett Morgan (whose design wasn’t like the modern one) and William Potts (whose design was). These were American inventions, but one look for the circle-slash in the archives of U.S. newspapers shows the well goes dry for any references before the 1970s or so.
There’s a reason for that, and that reason is that the idea is not an American one.
— A passage from **The Development and Evaluation of Effective Symbol Signs**, a document produced by the National Bureau of Standards to discuss the issues around making effective signage. This passage discusses a study, dating to the late 1970s, in which people were asked to determine what they were supposed to see based on the symbol they were looking at.
/uploads/No-Parking-Sign.jpg)
No Parking Sign
The crossed-out circle reflects a rare success story for the design-by-committee crew
Differences between Europe and the United States abound, but one of the most important? Language. Despite Europe and the U.S. being similar in geographic size, the U.S. mostly uses a single language, while European countries use around 24 official languages and many more spoken, but not considered official.
When road systems were built out, this actually affected the way each handled them. The U.S. built a system that more or less assumed you could read English, with signs covered in English words. Europe, meanwhile, relied on symbols.
This created problems for tourists in particular. As Hal Foust, the automotive editor for the Chicago Tribune, put it starkly in a 1962 op-ed:
Foust, see, had taken multiple vacations to Europe not long before writing his op-ed, and he saw the differences first-hand. He was able to drive throughout the continent, no problem. Good luck doing that here if you’re not fluent in English.
What did they do differently that American planners clearly failed to implement? Easy: A consistent system of symbols.
It took the Europeans a while to figure this out, too, but eventually, they did. Case in point: Here is a recreation of a “no parking” road sign in Germany, circa 1929:
/uploads/No-Parking-Germany-1929.png)
No Parking Germany 1929
And here is an updated version of said sign, circa 1937:
/uploads/No-Parking-Germany-1937.png)
No Parking Germany 1937
Hey, that’s the symbol we’re looking for! So, something must have happened in the meantime, right?
Yes, that would be correct, and that something took place in March 1931, when the League of Nations, attempting to manage the sudden explosion in road traffic, convened a Convention Concerning the Unification of Road Signs in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting worked from a piecemeal selection of informative symbols that created consistency across borders. The modus operandi of the event, from its proceedings:
The circle’s precedent, while not standardized, was nonetheless enough of a starting point that it eventually won the day. The issue was debated heavily by a subcommittee at the event in charge of “waiting prohibited” and “parking prohibited” signs. Nobody was happy with existing proposals. Eventually, in a compromise that turned out to be a new solution entirely, both signs ended up with a diagonal red stroke.
/uploads/League-Of-Nations-Europe-SIgns.jpg)
(United Nations Geneva)
This symbol became the “interdiction” symbol, after a French word for prohibition. But it was not the only term the symbol has fallen under since then, with a few others including the “universal no,” the “general prohibition sign,” and the “circle-slash.”
Starting in the 1930s and through World War II, this symbol-driven approach found firm footing throughout Europe, but in North America, it was a tougher sale. Many key symbols finally made their way over starting in the early 1970s, as officials figured out that maybe our signs shouldn’t just be giant words that people who don’t speak English won’t understand.
Once they did, it became such a dominant symbol that just over a decade after its American debut, it became a key part of the brand identity of one of our most popular and enduring movies.
About that movie, though …
1984
The year that the International Standards Organization included the general prohibition sign in its ISO 3864 safety standards, officially taking the signage away from the roads and into more general use. Notably, this is also the year a certain blockbuster made the symbol even more pervasive in American popular culture.
/uploads/Ghostbusters-Logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Willian Justen de Vasconcellos/Unsplash
The Ghostbusters slash is not up to ISO specs
So, here’s something you definitely haven’t considered regarding the immensely popular film series Ghostbusters, which is about to see the fifth installment in its 40-year history premiere later this month: Despite its significant role in popularizing the circle-slash in popular culture, that circle-slash setup is actually not up to spec.
See, there are two important things that circle-slashes tend to do that the original Ghostbusters logo does not do:
- The slash goes left to right in most cases, rather than right to left
- The slash is supposed to go 45 degrees on the dot
There are some smaller things, admittedly: The line should be a bit thinner, and should be thinner still in the slash area than the circle itself. (There has traditionally been back and forth on whether the interdicted object should expand outside the boundaries, but I will leave that debate to sign-designing subcommittees.)
Ultimately, I will concede that people looking at this logo are not thinking to themselves, “wow, what a horrible logo, I will never think of Dan Aykroyd the same way again.”
/uploads/Ghostbusters-Frozen-Empire.jpg)
Note how the angle of the slash on the Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire movie poster is slightly higher than in the logo on the vehicle. Maybe the ISO got to them?
The interesting thing is that whoever is designing the Ghostbusters logo in the modern day appears to have realized the design was off far enough to distract pedants, because later versions of the logo shifted the angle of the logo ever so slightly. While it’s not exactly 45 degrees on the dot, it’s closer than it once was. If I saw a Ghostbusters logo on a street sign, I would not force the vehicle to stop in horror in response to its overly thick lines.
A small amount of credit to the graphic designers of the world, who know that this pervasive logo design has slowly been driving us crazy since the Reagan administration.
1990
The year the “no smoking” symbol, perhaps one of the most prominent uses of the circle-slash, became a permanent fixture on all U.S. domestic flights. The symbol, a variant of the original designed by the graphic design association AIGA and the U.S. Department of Transportation in 1974, has done a lot to reinforce our view of circles and slashes as signifiers that things aren’t allowed.
What strikes me as fascinatingly difficult about this topic from a research standpoint is that the shaky nomenclature around it makes it hard to uncover its exact roots. It is one of the world’s most common symbols, used in all sorts of settings, and somehow it doesn’t have a consistent name. Which means, all too often, you’re stuck describing it based on its visual characteristics, rather than where it came from.
/uploads/No-Smoking-Airplane.jpg)
No Smoking Airplane
It is a great example of how visual language shows the flaws in how we look for information online. After all, here is this symbol, used basically everywhere, in varied contexts far beyond its primary use in road signage, and people endlessly struggle to describe it.
This circle-meets-slash combo raises a question: At what point do things become impossible to find online—not because they’re too rare or uncommon, but because they’re too ubiquitous? Where their present-day use cases drown out all examples of the past hiding around somewhere?
Even with all the technical innovations we’ve seen, the internet still surprises us with what it makes hard to find.
- -
For this piece, I want to thank a couple of folks who responded when I made the call for this on Bluesky and Mastodon, including Pavel Samsonov, who kicked off a fascinating thread on this topic on Stack Exchange—one of whom, Claus Colloseus, wrote a killer answer to the question. Additionally, a shout out to Terence Eden, who correctly identified the source of the image right away. All of you gave this piece a kick in the right direction.
Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! And if you need to clean out your old pics, give CleanMyPhone a spin.
GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy | Jay Mody
In this post, we’ll implement a GPT from scratch in just 60 lines of [numpy](https://github.com/jaymody/picoGPT/blob/29e78cc52b58ed2c1c483ffea2eb46ff6bdec785/gpt2_pico.py#L3-L58). We’ll then load the trained GPT-2 model weights released by OpenAI into our implementation and generate some text.
Note:
- This post assumes familiarity with Python, NumPy, and some basic experience with neural networks.
- This implementation is for educational purposes, so it’s missing lots of features/improvements on purpose to keep it as simple as possible while remaining complete.
- All the code for this blog post can be found at github.com/jaymody/picoGPT.
- Hacker news thread
- Chinese translation
- Japanese translation
EDIT (Feb 9th, 2023): Added a “What’s Next” section and updated the intro with some notes.
EDIT (Feb 28th, 2023): Added some additional sections to “What’s Next”.
Table of Contents
- Table of Contents
- What is a GPT?
- Setup
- Basic Layers
- GPT Architecture
- Putting it All Together
- What Next?
What is a GPT?
GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. It’s a type of neural network architecture based on the Transformer. Jay Alammar’s How GPT3 Works is an excellent introduction to GPTs at a high level, but here’s the tl;dr:
- Generative: A GPT generates text.
- Pre-trained: A GPT is trained on lots of text from books, the internet, etc …
- Transformer: A GPT is a decoder-only transformer neural network.
Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-3 are just GPTs under the hood. What makes them special is they happen to be 1) very big (billions of parameters) and 2) trained on lots of data (hundreds of gigabytes of text).
Fundamentally, a GPT generates text given a prompt. Even with this very simple API (input = text, output = text), a well-trained GPT can do some pretty awesome stuff like write your emails, summarize a book, give you instagram caption ideas, explain black holes to a 5 year old, code in SQL, and even write your will.
So that’s a high-level overview of GPTs and their capabilities. Let’s dig into some more specifics.
Input / Output
The function signature for a GPT looks roughly like this:
def gpt(inputs: list[int]) -> list[list[float]]:
# inputs has shape [n_seq]
# output has shape [n_seq, n_vocab]
output = # beep boop neural network magic
return output
Input
The input is some text represented by a sequence of integers that map to tokens in the text:
# integers represent tokens in our text, for example:
# text = "not all heroes wear capes":
# tokens = "not" "all" "heroes" "wear" "capes"
inputs = [1, 0, 2, 4, 6]
Tokens are sub-pieces of the text, which are produced using some kind of tokenizer. We can map tokens to integers using a vocabulary:
# the index of a token in the vocab represents the integer id for that token
# i.e. the integer id for "heroes" would be 2, since vocab[2] = "heroes"
vocab = ["all", "not", "heroes", "the", "wear", ".", "capes"]
# a pretend tokenizer that tokenizes on whitespace
tokenizer = WhitespaceTokenizer(vocab)
# the encode() method converts a str -> list[int]
ids = tokenizer.encode("not all heroes wear") # ids = [1, 0, 2, 4]
# we can see what the actual tokens are via our vocab mapping
tokens = [tokenizer.vocab[i] for i in ids] # tokens = ["not", "all", "heroes", "wear"]
# the decode() method converts back a list[int] -> str
text = tokenizer.decode(ids) # text = "not all heroes wear"
In short:
- We have a string.
- We use a tokenizer to break it down into smaller pieces called tokens.
- We use a vocabulary to map those tokens to integers.
In practice, we use more advanced methods of tokenization than simply splitting by whitespace, such as Byte-Pair Encoding or WordPiece, but the principle is the same:
- There is a
vocabthat maps string tokens to integer indices - There is an
encodemethod that convertsstr -> list[int] - There is a
decodemethod that convertslist[int] -> str[1]
Output
The output is a 2D array, where output[i][j] is the model’s predicted probability that the token at vocab[j] is the next token inputs[i+1]. For example:
vocab = ["all", "not", "heroes", "the", "wear", ".", "capes"]
inputs = [1, 0, 2, 4] # "not" "all" "heroes" "wear"
output = gpt(inputs)
# ["all", "not", "heroes", "the", "wear", ".", "capes"]
# output[0] = [0.75 0.1 0.0 0.15 0.0 0.0 0.0 ]
# given just "not", the model predicts the word "all" with the highest probability
# ["all", "not", "heroes", "the", "wear", ".", "capes"]
# output[1] = [0.0 0.0 0.8 0.1 0.0 0.0 0.1 ]
# given the sequence ["not", "all"], the model predicts the word "heroes" with the highest probability
# ["all", "not", "heroes", "the", "wear", ".", "capes"]
# output[-1] = [0.0 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.0 0.05 0.85 ]
# given the whole sequence ["not", "all", "heroes", "wear"], the model predicts the word "capes" with the highest probability
To get a next token prediction for the whole sequence, we simply take the token with the highest probability in output[-1]:
vocab = ["all", "not", "heroes", "the", "wear", ".", "capes"]
inputs = [1, 0, 2, 4] # "not" "all" "heroes" "wear"
output = gpt(inputs)
next_token_id = np.argmax(output[-1]) # next_token_id = 6
next_token = vocab[next_token_id] # next_token = "capes"
Taking the token with the highest probability as our prediction is known as greedy decoding or greedy sampling.
The task of predicting the next logical word in a sequence is called language modeling. As such, we can call a GPT a language model.
Generating a single word is cool and all, but what about entire sentences, paragraphs, etc …?
Generating Text
Autoregressive
We can generate full sentences by iteratively getting the next token prediction from our model. At each iteration, we append the predicted token back into the input:
def generate(inputs, n_tokens_to_generate):
for _ in range(n_tokens_to_generate): # auto-regressive decode loop
output = gpt(inputs) # model forward pass
next_id = np.argmax(output[-1]) # greedy sampling
inputs.append(int(next_id)) # append prediction to input
return inputs[len(inputs) - n_tokens_to_generate :] # only return generated ids
input_ids = [1, 0] # "not" "all"
output_ids = generate(input_ids, 3) # output_ids = [2, 4, 6]
output_tokens = [vocab[i] for i in output_ids] # "heroes" "wear" "capes"
This process of predicting a future value (regression), and adding it back into the input (auto), is why you might see a GPT described as autoregressive.
Sampling
We can introduce some stochasticity (randomness) to our generations by sampling from the probability distribution instead of being greedy:
inputs = [1, 0, 2, 4] # "not" "all" "heroes" "wear"
output = gpt(inputs)
np.random.choice(np.arange(vocab_size), p=output[-1]) # capes
np.random.choice(np.arange(vocab_size), p=output[-1]) # hats
np.random.choice(np.arange(vocab_size), p=output[-1]) # capes
np.random.choice(np.arange(vocab_size), p=output[-1]) # capes
np.random.choice(np.arange(vocab_size), p=output[-1]) # pants
This allows us to generate different sentences given the same input. When combined with techniques like top-k, top-p, and temperature, which modify the distribution prior to sampling, the quality of our outputs is greatly increased. These techniques also introduce some hyperparameters that we can play around with to get different generation behaviors (for example, increasing temperature makes our model take more risks and thus be more “creative”).
Training
We train a GPT like any other neural network, using gradient descent with respect to some loss function. In the case of a GPT, we take the cross entropy loss** over the language modeling task**:
def lm_loss(inputs: list[int], params) -> float:
# the labels y are just the input shifted 1 to the left
#
# inputs = [not, all, heros, wear, capes]
# x = [not, all, heroes, wear]
# y = [all, heroes, wear, capes]
#
# of course, we don't have a label for inputs[-1], so we exclude it from x
#
# as such, for N inputs, we have N - 1 langauge modeling example pairs
x, y = inputs[:-1], inputs[1:] # both have shape [num_tokens_in_seq - 1]
# forward pass
# all the predicted next token probability distributions at each position
output = gpt(x, params) # has shape [num_tokens_in_seq - 1, num_tokens_in_vocab]
# cross entropy loss
# we take the average over all N-1 examples
loss = np.mean(-np.log(output[np.arange(len(output)), y]))
return loss
def train(texts: list[list[str]], params) -> float:
for text in texts:
inputs = tokenizer.encode(text)
loss = lm_loss(inputs, params)
gradients = compute_gradients_via_backpropagation(loss, params)
params = gradient_descent_update_step(gradients, params)
return params
This is a heavily simplified training setup, but it illustrates the point. Notice the addition of params to our gpt function signature (we left this out in the previous sections for simplicity). During each iteration of the training loop:
- We compute the language modeling loss for the given input text example
- The loss determines our gradients, which we compute via backpropagation
- We use the gradients to update our model parameters such that the loss is minimized (gradient descent)
Notice, we don’t use explicitly labelled data. Instead, we are able to produce the input/label pairs from just the raw text itself. This is referred to as self-supervised learning.
Self-supervision enables us to massively scale training data. Just get our hands on as much raw text as possible and throw it at the model. For example, GPT-3 was trained on 300 billion tokens of text from the internet and books:
Table 2.2 from GPT-3 paper
Of course, you need a sufficiently large model to be able to learn from all this data, which is why GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters and probably cost between $1m-10m in compute cost to train.[2]
This self-supervised training step is called pre-training, since we can reuse the “pre-trained” models weights to further train the model on downstream tasks, such as classifying if a tweet is toxic or not. Pre-trained models are also sometimes called foundation models.
Training the model on downstream tasks is called fine-tuning, since the model weights have already been pre-trained to understand language, it’s just being fine-tuned to the specific task at hand.
The “pre-training on a general task + fine-tuning on a specific task” strategy is called transfer learning.
Prompting
In principle, the original GPT paper was only about the benefits of pre-training a transformer model for transfer learning. The paper showed that pre-training a 117M GPT achieved state-of-the-art performance on various NLP (natural language processing) tasks when fine-tuned on labelled datasets.
It wasn’t until the GPT-2 and GPT-3 papers that we realized a GPT model pre-trained on enough data with enough parameters was capable of performing any arbitrary task by itself, no fine-tuning needed. Just prompt the model, perform autoregressive language modeling, and voila, the model magically gives us an appropriate response. This is referred to as in-context learning, because the model is using just the context of the prompt to perform the task. In-context learning can be zero shot, one shot, or few shot:
Figure 2.1 from the GPT-3 Paper
Generating text given a prompt is also sometimes referred to as conditional generation, since our model is generating some output conditioned on some input.
GPTs are not limited to NLP tasks. You can condition the model on anything you want. For example, you can turn a GPT into a chatbot (i.e. ChatGPT) by conditioning it on the conversation history. You can also further condition the chatbot to behave a certain way by prepending the prompt with some kind of description (i.e. “You are a chatbot. Be polite, speak in full sentences, don’t say harmful things, etc …”). Conditioning the model like this can even give your chatbot a persona. This is often referred to as a system prompt. However, this is not robust, you can still “jailbreak” the model and make it misbehave.
With that out of the way, let’s finally get to the actual implementation.
Setup
Clone the repository for this tutorial:
git clone https://github.com/jaymody/picoGPT
cd picoGPT
Then let’s install our dependencies:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Note: This code was tested with Python 3.9.10.
A quick breakdown of each of the files:
-
**encoder.py**contains the code for OpenAI’s BPE Tokenizer, taken straight from their gpt-2 repo. -
**utils.py**contains the code to download and load the GPT-2 model weights, tokenizer, and hyperparameters. -
**gpt2.py**contains the actual GPT model and generation code, which we can run as a python script. -
**gpt2_pico.py**is the same asgpt2.py, but in even fewer lines of code. Why? Because why not.
We’ll be reimplementing gpt2.py from scratch, so let’s delete it and recreate it as an empty file:
rm gpt2.py
touch gpt2.py
As a starting point, paste the following code into gpt2.py:
import numpy as np
def gpt2(inputs, wte, wpe, blocks, ln_f, n_head):
pass # TODO: implement this
def generate(inputs, params, n_head, n_tokens_to_generate):
from tqdm import tqdm
for _ in tqdm(range(n_tokens_to_generate), "generating"): # auto-regressive decode loop
logits = gpt2(inputs, **params, n_head=n_head) # model forward pass
next_id = np.argmax(logits[-1]) # greedy sampling
inputs.append(int(next_id)) # append prediction to input
return inputs[len(inputs) - n_tokens_to_generate :] # only return generated ids
def main(prompt: str, n_tokens_to_generate: int = 40, model_size: str = "124M", models_dir: str = "models"):
from utils import load_encoder_hparams_and_params
# load encoder, hparams, and params from the released open-ai gpt-2 files
encoder, hparams, params = load_encoder_hparams_and_params(model_size, models_dir)
# encode the input string using the BPE tokenizer
input_ids = encoder.encode(prompt)
# make sure we are not surpassing the max sequence length of our model
assert len(input_ids) + n_tokens_to_generate < hparams["n_ctx"]
# generate output ids
output_ids = generate(input_ids, params, hparams["n_head"], n_tokens_to_generate)
# decode the ids back into a string
output_text = encoder.decode(output_ids)
return output_text
if __name__ == "__main__":
import fire
fire.Fire(main)
Breaking down each of the 4 sections:
- The
gpt2function is the actual GPT code we’ll be implementing. You’ll notice that the function signature includes some extra stuff in addition toinputs:-
wte,wpe,blocks, andln_fare the parameters of our model. -
n_headis a hyperparameter that is needed during the forward pass.
-
- The
generatefunction is the autoregressive decoding algorithm we saw earlier. We use greedy sampling for simplicity.[tqdm](https://www.google.com/search?q=tqdm)is a progress bar to help us visualize the decoding process as it generates tokens one at a time.
Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach — Infinite Negative Utility
July 4, 2018
Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a classic text that’s had a strong influence on countless people. It’s a venerated book among a certain stripe of computer scientist and mathematician, and it’s reputed to have inspired generations of people to pursue the study of logic and artificial intelligence. It’s a meandering meditation of a number of topics that oscillates around logic, language, formal systems, biology, neurology, music, art, and many more topics, with a particularly strong showing from the three titular figures—the logician Kurt Gödel, the artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach—as well as a heaping dose of writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll, who does not appear in the title but, at least on my copy, is explicitly invoked by the subtitle, “A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.” Many people count it as one of their very favorite books.
So, if you’re among the latter group, I should warn you that I’m about to give it a very lukewarm review.
I first read Gödel, Escher, Bach when I was about 20, while I was an undergraduate, and it’s important to note that I was double-majoring in computer science and linguistics, and had a particular love of formal systems and logic, but was also proudly a generalist, and had a long-standing love of literature and music. That particular configuration of interests meant that this book was laser-focused to speak to exactly the things that I loved. It was a perfect book for me!
…well, it would have been, but for some reason I kept struggling to get through it. I thought highly of it, but my secret shame was that my admiration for the book was based mostly on the first two hundred or so pages. It took slogging effort to get myself through the rest, effort sporadically applied over the course of years. I did eventually make my way through the whole thing, but even now, I can’t necessarily be sure I’ve read and absorbed every page, even though I’ve certainly looked at each one. By the end, my impression of the book was much more reserved: it does have some genuine high points and I can understand how it came to have its classic reputation, but I also felt it had a number of problems I’ve rarely seen discussed. For me personally, it ended up falling short of its reputation as a sparkling, effervescent text that drew together art, mathematics, and culture, and given how little I’ve seen this discussed, I wanted to write down why I feel this way.
The book is arranged into chapters, each beginning with a dialogue explaining a concept often using imaginative metaphor and a Socratic style, which is followed by a more traditional prose exploration of the concepts introduced in the dialogues. The dialogues are a big part of why I originally struggled with the book: they are meandering and long, and they regularly outstay their welcome. The Socratic style is a difficult one to write well without seeming contrived and difficult, and the book occasionally manages it, but it often falls incredibly flat: usually, they feature one character (usually Tortoise) explaining something verbosely, with conversational asides, but otherwise more or less mechanically, while the other character (usually Achilles) simply responds, “I see! Aha!” and follows up with a question that no real learner would ask but happens to be the next thing Hofstadter wants to talk about.
The other sections revisit the same ideas in prose, giving more concrete examples and dispensing with the catechistic form, and as such are able to give much terser and more interesting examples. Many of these are much clearer, and I remember on my first attempt at reading the book I was often tempted to skip the dialogues and read those first, because their explanations were often much more satisfying and took only a fraction of the time to read through. In some cases, the dialogues attempted to use metaphors that were nonsensical or even broken, and only by reading the chapter afterwards did the dialogue make any sense!
A good example here is the book’s explanation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The high-level, slightly handwavey description of this theorem is that, for any sufficiently expressive mathematical proof system, there are more true facts within the system than there are proofs for facts, which in turn means that not every fact can be proved: in short, that not every mathematical fact has a corresponding mathematical proof. My short explanation papers over a number of important features of this theorem, such as what I meant by a ‘sufficiently expressive mathematical system’, and all those features are addressed much more rigorously by the actual proof. It’s a fascinating theorem, and to Hofstadter’s great credit, Gödel, Escher, Bach helped bring knowledge of this theorem to a much wider population.
Unfortunately, when I first began to read the dialogue which touched on the theorem, I was frankly mystified. Hofstadter decided to explain its working by coming up with a metaphor involving record-players and records that are designed to physically break the record-players they’re played on. I’m familiar with how record-players work, but I have never played a record designed to break a record-player! This isn’t an intuitive metaphor, because while I have intuition for the operation of records and record-players, I don’t have any intuition at all about the universal manufacture of record-player-breaking records. The metaphor raises a number of questions: can the problem of record-player-breaking-records be suitably addressed by redesigning record-players? If no, why not? What if we simply read the information from a record using a visual device with no moving parts? What if we…?
A good metaphor has depth: you can convert a situation into the metaphor, visualize or reason about the implications of the metaphorical situation in isolation of the original situation, and then apply that back and have learned something about the original situation. However, the record-players in this metaphor don’t actually work like record-players in the real world, so my own lack of intuition means that reasoning about the original situation via the metaphor is effectively impossible. When I first read the dialogue, I had no idea what was being explained: once I started the following prose chapter, I realized that the “record-players” were formal systems, “records” in were theorems designed to be unprovable within those formal systems, and that the whole thing was an awkward physical metaphor for Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. In fact, it was only this realization that made me fully grasp the workings of metaphor in the first place: instead of the metaphor illuminating the theorem, I had to use my knowledge of the actual theorem to grasp what Hofstadter intended for the metaphor!
This is a pretty egregiously bad example, but it was also the point in the book where I realized that I wanted to like the book much more than I actually liked it in practice. I began to read onward and reread past sections with more skepticism, and I realized that the weaknesses which were particularly evident in the dialogue about Gödel’s paradox were still partially present in many of the other dialogues. The original inspiration for the dialogue chapters was Lewis Carroll’s short allegory What The Tortoise Said To Achilles, which expands on Zeno’s paradox of motion to make a point about the foundations of logic. Carroll’s dialogue is tight and focused and uses a rather clever metaphor, but the dialogues that punctuate Gödel, Escher, Bach are broad and meandering and the metaphors range from moderately serviceable to (like the one above) actively nonsensical, and the writing style is a mostly-mediocre Carroll pastiche, which means the characters often gratingly pepper their dialogue with interjections like, “Oh, my gracious! Oh, dear me! Oh, but you misunderstand! Go-golly! Oh, but that certainly won’t do!” I eventually came to the conclusion that, while the dialogues are one of the more memorable features of the book, they’re also an active impediment to conveying much of the book’s material in an efficient and clear way.
The non-dialogue chapters, as I’ve said, are better, although they also range in quality. Many of them are clear, lucid explanations of mathematical concepts intended for a layperson, which often begin by introducing mathematical systems through simple examples, showing what can be done with pure symbol manipulation of those systems, and only afterwards pulling back the curtain to explain what they “mean” in a mathematical sense. The explanations of computational systems have a similar quality, although several of the later chapters feel rather too complicated for their comparatively simple conclusions. On the other hand, the topics that aren’t about math or computers (or the shorter bits on workings of DNA) are introduced in a disappointingly cursory way that mostly consists of handwaving and pictures. Those latter sections lack depth and often betray strikingly little familiarity with or respect for the topic in question.
To give an egregious but illustrative example: Hofstadter mentions the experimental composer John Cage on a number of occasions, often bringing up Cage’s modernist and aleatoric work as a counterpoint to the meticulously tightly-constructed melodies of Bach. Hofstadter is unsurprisingly negative about Cage’s work, and usually characterizes it as avant-garde social commentary masquerading as music, and at one point a dialogue wryly suggests that John Cage might belong in a zoo. John Cage is most famous—or most infamous—for his piece 4’33”, which requires that a performer or group of performers walk onto stage and do not play their instruments for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. (It properly consists of three individual “movements” of non-playing whose lengths have been inconsistently specified across various editions of the score.) Hofstadter brings this piece up in a dialogue1:
Tortoise: […John Cage] has composed many celebrated pieces, such as 4’33”, a three-movement piece consisting of silences of different lengths. It’s wonderfully expressive—if you like that sort of thing. Achilles: I can see where if I were in a loud and brash café I might gladly pay to hear Cage’s 4’33” on a jukebox. It might afford some relief! Tortoise: Right—who wants to hear the racket of clinking dishes and jangling silverware?
Tortoise’s (and Hofstadter’s) explanation of Cage’s piece is fairly typical of explanations given of the piece: that is, four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. But this is, according to Cage’s intentions, a strictly incorrect interpretation of what he was trying to do! Cage’s actual intention in creating 4’33” was not to depict pure silence, but rather to force listeners in an auditorium to pay attention to the quiet and subtle sounds which they usually ignore when they listen to music. To make this painfully explicit, here is a quote from Cage about the original premiere of 4’33”:
They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.
Consequently, when Achilles and Tortoise agree that they’d rather hear silence than the sounds of a café, they’re getting the point of 4’33” exactly backwards: a performance of 4’33” in a café should ideally compel you to listen to the “racket of clinking dishes and jangling silverware” with more awareness than usual!
As I said, this isn’t an uncommon misunderstanding of John Cage’s intentions, and reasonable people can and do differ as to whether 4’33” is a reasonable execution of that intention, or if that intention is reasonable in the first place. However, even with a charitable reading of Gödel, Escher, Bach, it’s clear that Hofstadter isn’t disputing Cage’s artistic intention: instead, he doesn’t seem to know what sort of artistic intention Cage actually has, preferring to read his own ideas about social commentary into Cage’s work. His understanding of Cage and of the musical context in which Cage works is marked by a lack of context, a lack of deep engagement with the ideas there, and most importantly, a lack of respect. In the preface to my edition, he claims2 that he had,“…unambiguously heaped scorn on Cage’s music, albeit in a somewhat respectful manner,” but there’s very little respect or willingness to meet Cage on Cage’s own terms here, only guarded derision, and that lack of engagement ends up weakening every section that tries to discuss John Cage in particular and modernist music in general.
This sort of cursory engagement with the cultural features of the book ends up undermining one of the book’s major selling points: I had originally seen it as the work of a polymath effortlessly weaving fields together into a multifaceted but uniform whole, but in reality, areas that are more than a step or two outside Hofstadter’s areas of expertise (computer science, formal logic, some of the more mathematically rigorous bits of cognitive science) are at best shallow, and at worst are “…heaping scorn…” on things Hofstadter doesn’t understand and doesn’t appear to want to understand.
Despite the relatively surface-level interaction Hofstadter has with the world outside of mathematics and computers, he nevertheless loves to drop in thick, multilayered references to such topics in every cranny he can find. The central two characters in the dialogues are Achilles and Tortoise, borrowed directly from Lewis Carroll’s story above (which in turn borrowed them from the famous paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Zeno), and a Crab and a Genie show up on occasion as well. Their names are regularly abbreviated to a single letter, which means you can’t help but notice that those letters happen to map to the names of the nucleobases that appear in DNA—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. All the dialogues have sing-song names that are usually inspired by music, such as Sonata for Unaccompanied Achilles or Canon by Intervallic Augmentation or Birthday Cantatatata. Off-hand mentions of people and places are often wry and unexplained cultural allusions: a typical example is that, at one point in a conversation about popcorn, Tortoise awkwardly shoehorns in the story of a “Schönberg factory” in Vienna that outraged consumers by stopping production of a delicious tonic in favor of a boring cereal, this being a nod to the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg’s transition from traditional melodic compositions to experimental atonal pieces, a nod that never comes up elsewhere in the text of merits any explanation.3
I will admit right away that I personally find these heaps of unnecessary nods more tedious than interesting or endearing. There’s a lot of reference, but very little of it means anything. Occasionally, a dialogue will use these references to actually explain something—one dialogue is written in the form of a crab canon, and thus is identical when read forward or backward, as a memorable way of explaining that form of musical canon—but most of the musical or biological or literary allusions are there really for their own sake. These things are rarely being commented on, or discussed in interesting context, or connected to other ideas. Instead, these ideas simply appear because this is a book in which ideas appear, interrupting the text for a shoehorned cameo, like Stan Lee in a comic book movie. Why do the characters’ names map to nucleobases? I suspect if you asked Hofstadter, he’d claim it’s because one of the themes of the book is that all these ideas are connected (in the titular “golden braid”), but this kind of reference doesn’t actually connect anything to anything: it merely presents things adjacent to each other. It’s all flavor, no substance.
This might seem unfair, so I’ll give a very specific but pervasive instance of this sort of meaningless flavor. Many parts of the book invoke Zen, which is a school of Buddhism that originated in China and has spread to several other Asian countries but, in the Western mind, is usually associated with Japan. (We do, after all, know this school by its Japanese name Zen and not by its Chinese name Chán, its Korean name Seon, or its Vietnamese name Thiền.) Hofstadter’s idea of Zen is a substance-less cliché: it consists almost entirely of faux-Eastern “Oriental” aesthetics and some handwaving about kōans (which are stories used in Zen practice for teaching and meditation) without really delving into any particular aspect of actual Zen thought or practice. There are lots of references to it—for example, he names a theorem MUMON, after the Japanese name of Zen master Wúmén Huìkāi, as part of a vague and largely pun-based connection to one of Wúmén’s collected kōans—but none of those references have any substantial connection to the history or practice of Zen. In reality, Zen is a religious sect with history and cultural context and a complicated, multifaceted conversation that has been carried on throughout centuries. In Hofstadter’s telling, Zen is just some funny nonsensical stories from Japan.
The edition I have includes a preface in which Hofstadter talks, twenty years after the book’s release, about the book itself, its reception, and its legacy, and he goes out of his way to complain about a negative review of the book which accused him of being a hippie trying to popularize Zen. Hofstadter objects to this review because
As I declare at the start of Chapter 9, I find Zen not only confusing and silly, but on a very deep level utterly inimical to my core beliefs. However, I also find Zen’s silliness—especially when it gets really silly—quite amusing, even refreshing, and it was simply fun for me to sprinkle a bit of Eastern spice into my basically very Western casserole. However, my having sprinkled little traces of Zen here and there does not mean that I am a Zen monk in sheep’s clothing.
In this passage, Hofstadter openly admits to exactly the charge I’m bringing: that his inclusion of Zen is all about clichéd aesthetics (“Eastern spice”) and not at all about any of its substance—in this case, because he apparently doesn’t seem to think it has any!
What Hofstadter doesn’t admit to, but what I would argue, is that the whole book does this with almost every non-mathematical topic it tackles. His explanations of mathematics-adjacent topics do have substance and are often reasonably well-explained, but every time he branches out, he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s regurgitating shallow, half-misunderstood cliché: his discussions of modern art and music are, as I mentioned before, deeply lacking in this regard, but he name-checks plenty of artists, musicians, and writers with a high school understanding of who they were and what they did, preferring to pepper the text with photos of wacky paintings, drawing he made of letters that are made up of other letters, and tales of half-understood kōans. They’re all spice: his “casserole” is a few insubstantial layers of food underneath inch-thick layers of spices.
This also presents a problem with the entire underlying program of the book: it’s supposed to present examples of a common important idea—self-reference—resurfacing throughout various disparate areas, including mathematics and computation and art and music, but while this idea is well-motivated in the parts about mathematics and computation, but because most of the other topics the book tackles end up being just shallow aesthetics, then the “deep connections” there can only be present in shallow aesthetic ways. This was, for me, the ultimate breakdown of the promise of the book, as the grand unifying theme—the titular “eternal golden braid” of self-referential structures across domains—was only capable of unifying a few problem domains, as the rest of those connections were pretty but ultimately insubstantial.
While rereading bits of the book in order to write this post, I flipped through it at random and came across the photos marked as Figure 81, which in my copy at least appears on pages 490 and 491. These pages contain photos of television screens that are in turn displaying geometric images that result from pointing a camera at the screen: infinite turning shapes, nested and sweeping frames, eventually deforming into twirling light patterns. They are described in captions, beginning with plain descriptions like, “What happens when you rotate the camera,” and gradually becoming more florid, with captions like, “The galaxy has burned itself out, and become—a black hole!” The actual caption beneath these photos says the following:
Twelve self-engulfing TV screens. I would have included one more, had 13 not been prime.
These photos are fun! They feel especially endearing in 2018 because of the late-70’s television depicted, and they depict a fun experiment that I did as a child as soon as I got my hands on my parents’ bulky camcorder4. The captions, however, add very little, and the final comment (“…had 13 not been prime”) includes a bit of extra unnecessary whimsy that seems to wink at the reader but adds absolutely no meaning. Like so much of the book, it seems to hint at something grander while not signifying anything in particular. The photos themselves might be a fun illustration of something, but they’re not a particularly deep illustration of anything, and their inclusion here (surrounded by several pages of Achilles and Tortoise pontificating about the notion of “self-engulfing”) doesn’t bring any more enlightenment than when I first pointed a camcorder at a TV when I was four.
“A fun illustration of something,” is pretty much as far as the book goes: it hints at grand unifying patterns, but the pattern it finds is just the abstract notion of self-reference, and then it keeps bringing it up, making a few unnecessary references, showing some pictures, and asking, “Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that weird?” It’ll give a perfectly competent (if somewhat verbose) description of formal systems, but as soon as it tries to venture connections to other domains, or to explain more complicated or nuanced details, it turns out that the only connections it can draw consist of vigorous handwaving. The whole book boils down to Hofstadter giving a competent lecture on logic, intimating the existence of an eternal golden braid, and then pointing at some fun photos of televisions.
- This appears on page 156 of my copy.
- This appears on page P-18 of my copy, as part of a response to a critic who mistakenly believed that Hofstadter liked Cage.
- I happen to love atonal music, and I’d highly recommend watching Vi Hart’s video Twelve Tones which explains twelve-tone atonal music with plenty of examples and drawings of bird-bowls.
- Do young people know what a camcorder is these days? Do people still use the word ‘camcorder’?