Brian Thomas Clark

My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom... To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel... See more

This, I think, is another reason why Updike has so many detractors. Ever since F.R. Leavis wrote The Great Tradition , there has been a school of literary criticism that has demanded that great novelists also be great moralists: that the job of the writer is not just to reflect the world but to tell it the difference between right and wrong.

That is... See more

There is apparently an epidemic of loneliness in the United States. Everyone from Kristen Radtke to Hillary Clinton has written about it. Explanations are far-ranging but mostly come down to the same things: our communities have splintered, work has consumed our lives, our social contract has broken down, the internet has destroyed our ability to... 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

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

When we are grieving record stores, mixtapes, old-school romance, and friends goofing around in ‘90s high schools, what are we actually grieving? Delayed gratification. Deeper connection. Play and fun. Risk and thrill. Life with less obsessive self-scrutiny. These are things we can reclaim—if we remember what they are worth and roll back the... See more

The result is what Moskowitz describes as a “mirror maze”. We enter social media hoping to express ourselves but instead see endless refractions – ourselves as we want to be seen, as others might perceive us, as the algorithm is training us to become.

All of this has consequences for how we think and feel. Our sense of self begins to dissolve under... See more

Logging off

It’s easy to forget that we used to find music, movies, photography, and books entirely offline. You’re more likely to discover something truly serendipitous and surprising flipping through vintage magazines at your local public library than endlessly scrolling an Instagram feed that’s already tailored to your taste. Stroll through an... See more