Alex Burns

“That would be my advice to you as an artist as well as a man. If there’s something that’s dirty within you, you can’t just present it as is. You kind of have to turn the contradiction into something positive by sharing it with other people who might not think they have one. Sublimate those contradictions within you into art.”

Since its founding in 2012, A24 has consistently been on the upswing. The company’s success doesn’t come down to one thing, but a variety of factors: the championing of up-and-coming auteurs (Ari Aster, Greta Gerwig, Robert Eggers, the directorial duo known as the Daniels), which has established the studio as a reliable tastemaker; the execution of... See more

It should take time to figure out which hike you want to take. It should take time to learn how to make bread. It should take time to read, to really read, Toni Morrison or James Joyce. It should take time to figure out what kind of music moves you, and what kind of clothes feel like you, and to discern the different calls a bird makes. It should... See more

Make art, and while everyone is deciding what they think of it, make more art.” — Andy Warhol

Send handwritten letters

In this essay, I go deep on a Great American Bromance: the handwritten letters shared between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think most of us are so out of touch touch with letter writing (beyond stiff wedding Thank Yous) that we’d assume letters demand a formal comportment — and are therefore boring, onerous,... See more

Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it... See more