About This Website

The web has an almost infinite capacity for storage and memory yet its prevailing use is an acceleration of ephemerality. The reasons for this are complex to say the least (of which financial short term gain is probably the most prevalent). But this doesn’t mean the tendency can’t be resisted. Perhaps books as well as their online siblings could be... See more

The web has an almost infinite capacity for storage and memory yet its prevailing use is an acceleration of ephemerality. The reasons for this are complex to say the least (of which financial short term gain is probably the most prevalent). But this doesn’t mean the tendency can’t be resisted. Perhaps books as well as their online s

... See more

The problem for blogs was always search, audience capture, monetization, and the impulse to blather about nothing. I think the transition of essays out of blogs and into newsletters effectively solved these problems, since now the incentives incline more toward quality rather than quantity.

Philosophy

I care about text. I like words, and their meaning, and arguments and stories, and things like typography, and fonts. I don't like visual congestion, or digital waste, or needless complexity.

Blogging is beautiful. It's about sharing opinions on the web about anything, with one's own idea of aesthetics, however weird it is—or rather, espec... See more

My rough rule is that I’d like to write stuff that will still be worth reading in five years, and ideally stuff that will be more relevant a year from now. Because of the way news site algorithms currently work, that’s the opposite of what everybody who writes for a living does.

Media formats are cyclical. Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms and Twitter is aphorisms-as-a-service. Hip-hop brought back poetry. Montaigne pioneered the essay format and blogs brought them back into vogue.

Websites are living, temporal spaces.