Digital platforms are largely devoted to making users consume more, faster—think of TikTok’s frenetic “For You” feed or Spotify’s automated playlists. Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.

Success is often a product of environment.

While a polar bear might thrive in the Arctic, it would not thrive in a desert. People are no different. The person who excels in one environment fails in another.

Understanding how environments impact performance changes how you hire. Employees who thrive in one environment easily fail in another if their p... See more

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.


2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.


3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.


4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.


5. Start as close to the end as possib

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The app also has a serendipity slider from “Only show my selected interests” to “Show me everything.”

A good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters

“To live externally is to live more dangerously,” Moskowitz writes, of giving up the constant inward gaze. “It is to live a life that takes up public space, a life that is messy and confusing and thus a life that is often frowned upon, especially in an era in which everyone is accustomed to control and curation over social space and affect.”

“We make our fortunes and we call them fate.”

Chance IV comes to you, unsought, because of who you are and how you behave.

...Chance IV is so personal, it is not easily understood by someone else the first time around... here we probe into the subterranean recesses of personal hobbies and behavioral quirks that autobiographers know about, biographers

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I find explaining any actually interesting idea usually requires explaining like 5 subsidiary ideas. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky it’s like 25 and either they’re ready for a three hour lecture or you’re not going to succeed.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of con

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