Alex Burns

“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”

Talk to friends and family on the phone

Okay, you can take your phone and AirPods with you if you’re calling loved ones. I was inspired years ago by “the secret power of the eight-minute phone call.” The general idea is that casual connection protects against the erroneous perception of “time surplus,” an idea too many busy people have that in the... See more

Any avid self-deprecator immediately understands this logic: if we believe that the worst version of ourselves is the true one, we’re protected from being ambushed by our own inadequacy. Better to overestimate our flaws than to fail to see them in the first place. But this strategy is fundamentally isolating, leading us to create a brittle carapace... See more

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.

These habits help form what Hall and his co-author Andy Merolla, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, call the social biome, a way of thinking about the entire range of your social interactions. A healthy social biome is one with variety — among the types of people we talk to and the kinds of conversations we have — as well as... See more

Thanks to the alleged love triangle, Rodrigo and Carpenter have that built in. They have very thinly veiled songs about each other — a territory some of those past “rivals” have never really ventured in.

But what makes the Rodrigo-Carpenter dynamic unique is that they’ve both figured out how to make the “rivalry” work in their favor, embracing their... See more