Agalia Tan

When I host, plan, or participate in intellectual gatherings, my purpose is always this: I want to escape the condemnation of Margo Roth Spiegelman. I want to talk about “anything that matters.”

It’s about how it’s critical to have people in your life who love you and see you when you’re fun and sparkly and on top of the world, but also love you when you’re stagnant and petulant and self-sabotaging and letting them down. It’s about how that kind of love makes you believe in other kinds of love. It’s about how the essential texture of life... See more

Attempting to define, quantify and strategize around the zeitgeist is a game of tag. That’s what we’re after. That’s the Sisyphean task. It’s utterly daunting and exhausting, but that challenge is also where the opportunity (and fun) lies.

“How do you take a walk with someone on the internet?”

Song has said that although she embraces the escapism inherent in the genre, she included the concrete figure quite deliberately, prodding audiences to talk about money openly even if culturally it’s still considered impolite. “Let’s be realistic about that: It’s not polite to people who don’t want you to know how much money they have,”

A humanism that responds to the collapse of Big Authenticity will be sexier . As Magdalene Taylor recently wrote, “Real things and actual human experiences are hot, even in the written form. They have a libidinal energy that’s been drained from us in the current technological era. And we’re going to want to get that energy back.”

All this taste talk has set off a minor arms race to prove that you have it. Founders show off their “taste” with garish high-end swag and pretentious company names like “The X Company of Y.” Suddenly, SaaS startups are hiring “storytellers,” documentary filmmakers, print magazine editors. They are throwing soirées with Luma waitlists and... See more