Alex Burns

Like many writers before me, I tend to lean on vague hand-waving when the need to define taste, or rather, good taste, arises. A common trope is to use the phrase US Supreme Court justice Stewart famously gave to describe obscenity, a similarly hard-to-describe bedfellow of taste, in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” In design, good taste can be kno... See more

Haruki Murakami, writer: If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you only think what everyone else is thinking.

Have killer voice. How do you develop killer voice? Be confident. How do you develop confidence? Read oodles and write oodles more. If you’re sending a “list newsletter” you better have one hell of a point of view because, well, there are oodles-upon-oodles of list newsletters out there. Generally, like with much good writing, the magic for readers

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Mr. Baffert’s horses have won the Derby six times, and he has been named champion trainer four times. He is third on the career earnings list with more than $355 million in purses. Mr. Baffert also has a lengthy record of rule violations. According to regulators’ records, horses trained by him have failed 30 drug tests over four decades — most nota... See more

Because right now there is someone

Out there with

a wound in the exact shape

of your words.

There are infinite quotidian human experiences ripe for interpreting: putting off housework, caring about who I sit next to at a dinner party, struggling to get dressed. They stack up every day. I’m particularly fond of using them to draw ungenerous conclusions: I’m shallow, selfish, lazy, dishonest. I’ve trained myself away from defending my goodn... See more

The Power of Full Engagement whose author Jim Loehr (recently on Farnam Street) argued that we must manage our energy rather than our time. He advises to alternate between being fully engaged and fully dis-engaged, between intense spurts and deep rest — real rest, not the low-burning engagement which leads to burning out.

Cheer was a pandemic-era smash, elevating the dazzling but little-known sport of college cheer to the level of national obsession and reframing cheer itself from a sideline spectacle at football games to a thrilling and often perilous main event.