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When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer By Walt Whitman When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I…
I was in the Musée d'Orsay in 2016 and I was hopelessly sad. I had just split from a boyfriend when neither of us had wanted to because he was moving away. I was on a three-week immersion program in France, being perfectly rotten: too cool for group activities and fairly depressed. I found myself in front of “Vue de toits (Effet de neige)” (essentially view of roofs tops, snow effect) by Gustave…
On Hyper-Optimized Content, Memetic Viruses, and the Theft of the Self I have had the uncanny experience of opening Pinterest lately and finding, amidst the tiles on wedding aesthetics and garden design, lurid short videos playing automatically. Werewolf love stories feature prominently. As do romances with mafia bosses. Evil sibling rivalaries, revenge stories against bullies. I am learning a lot…
Goya's The Madhouse Every week, I bike through the worst neighborhood of San Francisco and then get into the manual elevator at the historic, decaying building that holds my ballet studio. There, I spend a few minutes with the operator who is clearly and visibly insane. I enter some monologue that has been running for a long time. It doesn't necessarily involve you, it’s just whatever is on his…
I feel profoundly American when I travel to Germany. I was only a few hours off the plane when I started to notice it. Someone in our group at Don Giovanni had to sit next to a stranger, a big conundrum for my German party. I couldn't care less, so I left my clump of conferring Germans and took my seat, gave him a smile, and forgot about it. Then we had questions about the second half of the…
This is the post I wish someone had sent me as a freshman in college. I get a lot of mentorship emails. I probably call with one in ten of them somewhat randomly based on how much time and energy I have that given week, and I ignore the rest -- and I feel very bad about it. This post is some advice that I would give to those seekers. Does it matter what I study in college? Yes and no. I studied…
One common reaction to this is that it will lead to a less meaningful life; that without struggle some essential form of human striving will have been lost. I find that argument somewhat appealing, but I'm also curious who decides what the exact optimal amount of struggle is, and for whom.
Increasing complexity requires increasing delegation. As a company grows, it needs more layers of management to delegate tasks, process...
But it was also worth it because of a piece of advice I received — Anders would tell us again and again: “Go hard to go easy.”
“a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent..." - Middlemarch, Chapter 3
I met someone recently who was a passionate supporter of online ads. I met him in the audience of a lecture. He was speaking to a friend. Wi
This pattern made me think about idea generation more broadly, the pace at which different people produce good, novel ideas, and how we migh
I now use Claude every day, multiple times a day, both in my work and personal life. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: I rarely...
In conversation with Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America. While I have...
The London Review of Books just published my Letter to the Editor. It responds to Rebecca Solnit's "In the Shadow of Silicon Valley" from...