Agalia Tan

Life is modular, not linear. You don't choose a career at twenty-two and stick with it for forty years like some kind of professional arranged marriage. Instead of hunting for the mythical perfect tree, follow your curiosity. What ideas make you pause while scrolling? What conversations do you find yourself returning to days later? When a friend me... See more

My latest column at The New Yorker is about the revenge of homepages: Why we're turning toward individual websites as the platform era of the internet continues to disintegrate.

I started working on this piece because I've found myself going to homepages more often. It's a way to get a controlled, curated look at what a publication offers, and a ch... See more

We lose the feeling that comes with a little mystery and a healthy amount of risk. When we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, you know what happens? We get to be surprised. Our anticipation builds in the not knowing – better get there early to figure out getting in, ask others if it’s their first time, scan a pamphlet for clues or read seat... See more

We need the weeping, the 3 am whisperings, the downpours or the dancing until you’ve sweat through your clothes and your skin and the stitches holding it all together.

We need to be fed.

So feed us.

the way we sell ideas in the first place. Concepts are much harder to make fun than executions. They also are most open to interpretation, turning future rounds of review into wrestling matches between difference in expectation.

We spend so much time thinking about the big idea, the joy of the output suffers.

It’s research, but not in a traditional sense of research. It’s almost like a personal philosophy research or something. It’s how you form your opinions about a specific category of things. The terms I use most often are “textured” and “resonant” — I think when you see collections that have been cared for over many years and have a very specific vi... See more

Absorb or create a critical vocabulary

If you don’t have any vocabulary for a medium, then the film or song or dish simply appears as a blur of impressions, it’s hard to draw lines and isolate the particular areas and causes of enjoyment. So, having a better vocabulary for a given medium doesn’t just make you sound smart, it increases the resolutio... See more