Alex Burns

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

Since its founding in 2012, A24 has consistently been on the upswing. The company’s success doesn’t come down to one thing, but a variety of factors: the championing of up-and-coming auteurs (Ari Aster, Greta Gerwig, Robert Eggers, the directorial duo known as the Daniels), which has established the studio as a reliable tastemaker; the execution of... 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

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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“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