Research is this: you make up a problem, and then you solve it . I remember immediately feeling very silly, for both the thought itself and the feeling of epiphany, but there it was, ringing in my head like a bell.

You can skip the first step by picking a problem someone else has made up, but somewhere along the way, someone has, in fact, made it... See more

My theory of real is that a creative work is real if it has a good reason to exist. If its creator can look themselves in the eye and say with full honesty that they know why they’re making it, and that they like why they’re making it.

It’s a generous standard, if I do say so myself. There are a lot of possible good reasons for something to exist,... See more

He says that being a hater, even if you’re actually right, is fundamentally uninteresting, and just being mean about other people’s work, even if you do it privately, doesn’t make you smarter or better. He says that Wyeth’s essential problem is that he doesn’t just have a cop in his head, he has every imagined audience and every response they would... See more

My prescriptive theory of real when it comes to paper writing, therefore, is simply that researchers should have a point of view, and the work should reflect that. That’s my hack for how to write real papers because I think that working towards your point of view is almost always a good reason to write a paper. It’s not to say that it needs to be... See more

It planted the question in my psyche. What is the reason a book should exist? What is the motivation to publish a book? If someone else were to ask me whether the fact that they wanted to publish was a good enough reason, I would say, yeah, of course. For myself, I was like, sure, it’s a good enough reason, but do I want to publish it for the right

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