Bec Lee

Here, there are three main kinds of villain: mirror villains (in which the villain and hero have similar abilities and backgrounds); foil villains (in which the villain’s strengths match the hero’s weaknesses); and villains, or antagonists, that evoke feelings of primal fear in the hero (such as the aliens from Aliens and the shark from Jaws).

so lately, i’ve been trying to re-learn. not to be good at things. not to master them. but to remember what it feels like to live inside my life without constantly asking it to justify itself. hobbies, i’m realizing, are less about skill and more about permission. permission to be a beginner again. permission to be mediocre. permission to fail... See more

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and... See more

This loss of agency over our own attention that many of us are experiencing is not about willpower. It’s about neuroscience: