Magic 8 Ball Mind

Nonetheless, I still find myself longing for more time, and dreaming fondly of my life as it existed three or four years ago. It simply had so much space in it. Time that made it easy to fill so many different buckets in my life. Now I fill each bucket knowing that it means that another two will stay dry. The good news is that I imagine things will

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Making things is hard and I feel like that’s the most useful thing to say about it. You have to try to be consistent, you have to practice constantly, you have to read, and you can’t make yourself be interested in topics you aren’t interested in. And you have to accept that it’s always going to be challenging. My friend said this about her work, wh... See more

But the issue of children and who looks after them has become, in my view, profoundly political, and so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood without explaining to some degree how I found the time to write it. For the first six months of Albertine’s life I looked after her at home while my partner continued to work. This exp

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I both have so much to say and nothing to say. Perhaps it is that some of what I have to say simply requires more time and space to marinate than these weekly letters allow; perhaps it’s that some of what I have to say isn’t meant to be said to 23,000 people but instead to my partner, or my child, or a friend, or in a longer-term project. Perhaps i... See more

NC: Boringly, my creativeness is in no way pathological. I work very hard, every day, and on some level it’s a dogged nine to five slog, and if it seems like my output is greater than your average musician or whatever it is I am, it’s because I put in more hours. It’s as simple as that.

That is not to say that on occasions I don’t enter into that wo... See more

That the answer to all these questions—of art, of children, of startups—is “pay attention to your circumstances, work hard, establish the right culture, and manage your emotions” might be the most unsatisfying advice ever given. Still, it is the advice that I believe to be correct. There is no spreadsheet that will tell me how to raise my daughter ... See more