Agalia Tan

Lately, when I’m stuck on a piece, I will print everything I’ve written and re-read it with a pair of scissors in hand. As I go, I will cut out the pieces that feel like they’re working: a phrase here, a sentence there, entire paragraphs if I’m lucky. Then I’ll lay out all the cut-out pieces on my desk and move them around, trying to find the right... See more

The rise of the ‘Luxury Worker’

The luxury worker does not compete on volume.

They do not scale by adding headcount.

They scale by increasing the perceived value of their participation. Their work is expensive not because it takes longer, but because it carries the weight of curiosity, curation, and judgment.

In many ways, this inverts the usual... See more

This is the root of Klein’s theory. “The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance,” she wrote in 1990, meaning it’s less about how close a woman hews to the beauty standards than the fact that she believes she’s never close enough, and acts accordingly. “Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that... See more

Everything is multi-platform and multimedia. Not just journalist-personalities, but every magazine issue, every feature package, every article. The article is just the intellectual property made to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible. The presentation has to be optimized in every venue: You need good Instagram pinned posts, whether you’re a... See more

Now A.I. companies are attempting to hitch themselves to a similar aura of artisanality, even as their core products promise to automate all that is human into obsolescence. Last year, Anthropic hosted a pop-up café in Manhattan (what could be more hipster?) and gave away baseball caps embroidered with the word “thinking.” OpenAI’s recent Super... See more

This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.

And it doesn’t just stay as language. It begins to structure behaviour. For some Gen Z women, opting out of dating altogether has become less a personal decision and more a shared posture, a quiet refusal to participate in a system that feels increasingly transactional. Others, as podcaster Charli Chats points out, feel reluctant to leave even... See more