Brian Wiesner

As Mireille Silcoff noted in a piece exploring how real life subcultures have been reduced to online aesthetic trends: ‘youth culture’ comes alive when the sun goes down, and by stopping young people from hanging out in cities at night, they’re ultimately cutting off the lifeblood of these scenes: “ the youth belong at the rave, at the block party,... See more

So, no. I do not sit around and write all day—if only. I have a day job. Almost all novelists do, unless they’re Sally Rooney or have a spouse who supports them.

Life is nothing more than a series of stages, one after another. Our problem is that we often enjoy a particular stage so much that we’re hesitant to move to the next one. Each chapter should be enjoyable, yes, but each chapter should also prepare you for a new chapter that you could only reach by experiencing your current one . And you do, at some... See more

But if you think about your career from the perspective of which skills you have developed and where else they might be applicable, you’ll realize that opportunities are near-infinite . Journalists can become investors. Corporate executives can become authors. Even in the case of the most rigid disciplines such as law and medicine, nothing is... See more

language models are not intelligent in the ways that even small children are intelligent, but they are already superhuman at tasks like summarization, translation (both linguistic and conceptual), and association. And when you apply those skills to artfully curated source material written by equally, but differently, gifted humans, magic can... See more

When I arrived at the first of the many neighbourhoods that I would call “my barrio,” I was able to leverage proximity to quickly integrate into the local community with a level of Spanish that was enough to be able to make an effort. I took advantage of the low social barriers to entry. With a wealth of meeting places on my doorstep, I was able to... See more

What we forget, however, is that the story of the Starving Artist is a myth. And like all myths, it may be a powerful story, one we can orient our entire lives around.

The barrio is a living and breathing social experiment. There are no algorithms funnelling like-minded people down echo chambers. It’s organic. It’s both routine and spontaneity.

Everyone is trying to over-engineer this thing, but it is actually pretty simple.

Because there are very few people who are networking, even fewer are networking well .

I present you with the opportunity to be one of the few. One of the scrappy. One of the curious. One of the brave who decide that networking isn’t defined by the amorphous icky... See more