Agalia Tan

Getting older is a relentless process of paring down. Getting older is an exercise in letting go. Let go of anger: “I’m at the age now where you just—you’ll die.” Let go of fitting in, of going up to Rao’s with important people. Let go of other people’s opinions: “That doesn’t mean you don’t take advice and you don’t discuss and argue, but at a... See more

The most important shift in marketing right now is not the rise of creators, the decline of followers, or even the dominance of TikTok. It is the collapse of the idea that we are still operating inside a genuinely social media environment at all.

There is a trope in romance that when you meet the person you are supposed to be with, you can talk about anything. You can apparently inverse that too: if you talk about anything that pops into your mind, you can tell if you're supposed to be with the person by judging their reaction.

"Four questions that can tell you a lot:

1. When you wake up, do you expect today to have many joys or many frustrations?


2. When presented with an opportunity, do you have a bias toward action or do you postpone decisions?


3. When things go well for others, do you enjoy cheering them on or do you hate to hear about their success?


4. When things go wrong, do

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At T-minus seven minutes to the meeting, I rushed my laptop up a flight of stairs to the desk of a secretary and huffed out a desperate plea: Please print this for me, seven copies. She looked up at what surely was a normal speed, but which I perceived as the pace of a snail emerging from a shell, and said,

“Just give me a second, dear.” She smiled.... See more