Agalia Tan

there’s a certain intractable uneasiness we all feel about being alive, and that flits between feelings of loneliness and feelings over being totally overwhelmed and feeling nothing and feeling scared and none of those things present in the same way each individual time we feel them, and the great trick friend.com and its ilk is attempting to do pu... See more

To paraphrase Marx, we might hunt for jobs on LinkedIn in the morning, fish for compliments on Instagram in the afternoon, criticize each other on Twitter after dinner, and be as lascivious as we like on Tinder in the late evening, without letting any of these identities define us...  Nevertheless, something is lost in this fractionalization o... See more

That is the predicate of the slender, poetic 1993 novel  Einstein's Dreams by physicist Alan Lightman — a book about time and the tricks we play on ourselves to bear our transience, a book that does for time what Alain de Botton’s  The Course of Love does for love: punctuating a fictional world with philosophical quickenings, th... See more

it gives to the rest of us the aesthetic, intellectual, and psychological satisfactions of having a rounded experience, of seeing the finish line in the distance, approaching it, arriving at it.

The ‘rigor of form’ is part and parcel of physical output, but it is something we have to work harder for in digital.