Brian Thomas Clark

By the time the Voice had assumed its current semi-undead form, following a 2020 resurrection, the creeping irrelevance of any bounded and singular context—including that of a town, much less “the biggest media town in America”—had become the kind of thing a person might fail to notice while engaged in the ruthless business of noticing everything... See more

Complexity increases because adding is easy and removing is dangerous.

Whenever there's a problem, we add: a new person, requirement, or process. We never subtract.

Why?

Because everything that already exists has a champion. That clause in the tax code, that step in the process, that feature in the product ... someone fought for it, and they'll... See more

KRF : How do you define taste?

BD : Taste is the natural tendency to filter, mix and recombine the like and the unlike to approximate sublimity.

Social media encourages us to think of every thought we have as interesting; it makes everyone else feel accessible, and therefore disposable; it exposes us to endless bad actors, hardening our hearts and compelling us to suspect the worst; it rewards vulnerability, but also incentivizes defensiveness; and, most cogently for the purposes of this... See more

Thinking of yourself as an observer is better for your happiness than obsessing over being observed.

Every carefully tended knowledge garden is a fingerprint of consciousness: A unique archipelago of interests, insights and inspirations that could never be replicated, even by the most sophisticated AI.

By thoughtfully collecting and connecting the ideas that move us, we not only create an invaluable external memory system (which can be great for... See more

I'm not alone in this experience. I recall discussing with Chris Black of How Long Gone how influential these magazine-driven Borders explorations were for him. It was akin to traveling without the expense of a Virgin Atlantic ticket, building a repository of references by turning pages and tapping into cultural hubs. It involved dedicating time... See more