Agalia Tan

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap : situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

The mediocrity trap is a nasty way t... See more

At its best, cultural criticism is love and art that exists to give love to other expressions of art. It's beautiful in its indulgence.

Poet Sylvia Plath on the courage to close doors:

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go b... See more

brands solve coordination problems. Advertising taps a basic need of people to conform to the norms of the community they’re in

“People call romantic films ‘chick flicks’ as a way to diminish them, which I find unspeakably sad, not just for the way it excludes ‘chicks’ from the realm of ‘serious people,’ but also for the way it excludes ‘serious people’ from the realm of romance and love.

Again, why do films have to be these static, fixed things? Why can’t they be these fluid, storytelling structures that you could keep adding things to and keep revising? Yeah, it’s always been this constraint of the medium, that now, when everything is digital, there’s no physical media that we’re dealing with with film. So, why are we still held b... See more