Alex Burns

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

Because right now there is someone

Out there with

a wound in the exact shape

of your words.

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

from the radio producer Ira Glass, on feeling disappointed by your own work:

All of us who do creative work...get into it because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making...It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but

... See more

Part of what makes fall so accessible to Gen Z is that you can create content about it from inside your bedroom, with a string of orange LEDs, a hot beverage, and a few pumpkin throw pillows. Summer doesn’t offer the same accessibility: Conjuring summer on the feed means vacations (costly) or bathing-suit content (not everyone’s thing). Fall is a... See more

“We live in an age of discovery,” Adams’s sister wrote to her, “One of our acquaintances discovered that a full grown child may be produced in less than five months!”

She goes on to explain that the husband of the new mother in question was out of town nine months earlier ... suggesting this baby is not, in fact, a miracle of the age of discovery... See more

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