Chad Aaron Hall

Bensenville leads our list of America's dying small towns. Other manufacturing hubs hit hard by declines in the auto industry appear on the list. They include places like Kokomo, Ind., Austintown, Ohio, and Middletown, Ohio.

Great artists work. Mediocre artists talk a lot about tools.

Author Elias Canette wrote:

The largest crowds are drawn by the storytellers. It is around them that the people throng most densely and stay longest... their words come from further off and hang longer in the air than those of ordinary people.

A journal is an artificially permanent record of thought and inner life, which are invariably transient — something the most prolific diarist in modern literary history articulated herself in her elegant defense of the fluid self. We are creatures of remarkable moodiness and mental turbulence, and what we think we believe at any given moment —... See more

The way I put this into practice is by regularly publishing short-form posts, and then periodically taking a few weeks (or months) to go deep into one long-form post.2 The short-form posts keep me in a playful spirit, allowing me to touch all kinds of topics that I find intriguing. The commitment level is low, while the spontaneity is high.... See more

We understand that our favorite creatives are the ones that invest significant time and energy toward a brilliant piece of work. That this devotion to quality is the window into their genius.

However, we tend to conveniently put this dedication aside for our own work. We like to tout “quantity over quality,” and advise others to optimize for width... See more