"Scorn the pleasure which comes from the applause of the majority. Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself, if you are a person whom the many can understand? Your good qualities should face inwards."

"It's easier than ever for writers to earn good money, but don't get it twisted: You still must dare to be a loser."

"There are too many possible lifestyles now, and it's a bigger problem than you realize."

"Historically, many of the most interesting and important writers have tended to carve out insular, informal pockets of autonomous cultural activity from which they could birth something larger. These pockets would shield members from the _...Read More_

"On fatherhood and the unspeakable terror of steering the ship."

"On new, untapped modes of veridiction."

"On the value of soul in the era of machine intelligence."

"For the most part, Johnson studied and wrote through a lifetime of poverty. He was a hypochondriac with nervous tics, who never enjoyed the support of a patron. He came of age at a difficult time for writers, a time when patronage was _...Read More_

"It's easy to lament the decline of testosterone, but most Americans prefer a low-testosterone society—including many of those who lament the decline of testosterone."

"Are you OK, babe? You've barely touched my mushy dots and it's thwarting my aspiration"

How to "kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections."

"At the end of 2022, the artist traveled to Alto Hospicio, Tarapacá, Chile, the driest desert on the planet and home to one of the world’s largest dumping grounds for unwanted and unsold clothing. Each year, approximately 39,000 tons of _...Read More_

"A new field of psychology has begun to quantify an age-old intuition: Feeling awe is good for us."

"In her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, poet Mary Ruefle suggests that we might think of a life as one long sentence, separated by an infinite number of semicolons. She asks us to be grateful for the unsung punctuation’s _...Read More_

"On William S. Burroughs, the Beats, and the virtues of privacy and ignorance."