Alex Burns

Do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

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

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

“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.”