When Elliot protests that he can’t just do nothing, he is seeing and judging himself from the perspective of a culture that looks with disdain at anything that smacks of inactivity. Under constant self-scrutiny as to whether he is being sufficiently productive, he feels ashamed when he judges himself to have come up short in this regard. But this l

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In the digital age, cultural artifacts are eroded by abundance. Timelines layer and compress artwork, images, and artifacts into corners of the internet. In my corner, I stumbled across a speech entitled “Perfume, Defense and David Bowie’s Wedding” delivered by Brian Eno in 1992 at the Sadler Wells Theatre in London. In it, Eno predicted the nonlin... See more

But the curation was never about financial reward. It was “there's a small unscalable business here about taste, that people rely on and really like, and everyone who works on it doesn't make very much money, but they're very cool.” We just don't live in a world where that's an acceptable way to live. There's a lot of economic pressures and again, ... See more

Complicated Culture

Daisy Alioto with W. David Marx.

dirt.fyi

why is a restaurant reservation a high status thing? It's because it is in a specific place. It is finite in supply. A lot of times you have to be somewhat connected to get it. It is the opposite of the Internet.

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I simply think we can't keep sleepwalking into hoping the (poptimist) world ge

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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 e... See more

I suspect the rise of inspiration-sharing platforms might be making me, and everyone else on the collaborative internet, more focused on publicising our taste rather than feeding it. It’s easier to go viral on Twitter (err, X) by posting “vintage design inspiration” than it is by posting your own work. New sites like PI.FYI, a social network from t... See more

Some companies have sought to alleviate the strain by offering sessions in mindfulness. But the problem with scheduling meditation as part of that working day is that it becomes yet another task at which you can succeed or fail. Those who can’t clear out their mind need to try harder – and the very exercises intended to ease anxiety can end up exac

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Susan would complain that the present, the life she was living moment to moment, felt unreal to her. Only the future really mattered, for that was where her ideal life resided. “If I just wait a little longer”, she would remark in a tone of wry despondency, “there’ll be this magically transformative event and everything will come right.”

This belie

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What my students seek is what I sought: not just a place to publish, of which there remain plenty, but a place to aspire to, the kind of established, vital ecosystem within which a writer can learn, play, feud, create meaning, spark conversation, make sense of herself and her world. Rare by definition, such things grow more elusive by the day.