౨ৎ Girl blog

I’m extremely wary of the cult of contemporary self-making, and the fact that it’s become an expected part of life in the attention economy for middle-class workers.

From the college essay – the first time many of us are required to tell a selling story of ourselves in the service of social capital – to the dating website to Twitter or Instagram, we... See more

This AI boom has set off an existential crisis in me. Some background: I’ve been teaching writing for the past six years. In that time, I developed frameworks for how to write well and a reputation as a good teacher to learn from. Partially because of the AI wave, I decided to stop teaching. It has only been four months since I shut down my busine... See more

The way to get novelty is to write about topics you've thought about a lot. Then you can use yourself as a proxy for the reader in this department too. Anything you notice that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably also surprise a significant number of readers. And here, as with correctness and importance, you can use t... See more

Text allows for the ultimate kind of selectivity: your constraint is not the sounds and sights of your actual life, but the depth of your imagination. When you share about your life over personal essays, you can hide your facial expressions and body language, your tone of voice. You can project decisiveness, self-assurance, and whatever else you wo... See more