Alex Burns

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

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Betches is exploring a variety of strategies to grow, from sports and events to a splashy podcast deal with the TikTok news star V Spehar of Under the Desk News. It’s in talks for a partnership with the comedian Ilana Glazer (a gushy fan who described Betches as “if ‘Broad City’” — her cult hit TV show — “were a media company”).

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.

Are you a Creative Pragmatist? You know I pretty much abhor labels, I find them constricting. Except when they are not. And this is one of those times. You see, the label “CP” gives a name, permission if you will, to those whose style is Creative, but still Pragmatic. And some days, the scale may tip more creative. And then quite the opposite on... 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

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

In about the 13th century, we first get “like” in our language and it is a verb. Then around the 15th and 16th centuries, we start to use it in similes. And then around the 16th century, you start using it as a conjunction, where instead of just being between two objects, you’re expressing similarity between an object and a whole sentence: “He rode... See more