Authenticity
What does it mean for something to be 'authentic'?
Keely Adler and
Authenticity
When scientific progress destabilized religious authority and the lack of meaning found in a pure rational worldview revealed science’s limitations, movements like Theosophy offered a kind of third way, a path toward understanding the world between science and religion. Theosophy was in conversation with both realms, using tools like magical practi
... See moreJessa Crispin • Culture, Digested: The Worst Book I Read This Year
Meanwhile, a fixation on honesty continues to pervade popular arts discourse, music included. Indie scenesters have historically been the ones to agitate most over authenticity, but in the golden age of confessional pop music, the aesthetic concern with honesty isn’t limited to subculture anymore. Direct access to artists’ personal lives seems more
... See moreDirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...
Confessional art can be beautiful, and it can be terrible; either way, to love it only as a representation of what we already know is to deny it, and ourselves, a much richer complexity. Pop music is where fantasies are played out, turned into mansions and lived in, where five hundred people can tumble out of a clown car and every dream comes true.
... See moreDirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...
Swept up in the Instagramization of the 2010s, the contemporary poetry world saw an exaltation of ‘honesty’ as an aesthetic priority. Poetry not as craft, but as ‘outlet,’ with the goal not of developing ourselves and enriching our understanding of the world, but of sitting more comfortably with how we already were and what we already believed. Wat
... See moreDirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...
Honesty is a strange aesthetic criterion to prioritize. Great confessional art was never about accurately representing reality, but about giving voice to the process of experiencing it—how we feel, not what we’re feeling, making lucid that which usually eludes full expression.
Dirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...
Where we struggle to imagine a future beyond the contemporary shitshow, nihilism leads the retreat inwards; in art as in politics. “What good is a flourishing poetry market,” Watts asked, “If what we read in poetry books renders us more confused, less appreciative of nuance, less able to engage with ideas, more indignant about the things that annoy
... See moreDirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...
You never called Eight Sleep a mattress company. Instead, you pioneered a new category of ‘sleep fitness’ by positioning it as a ‘sleep fitness brand.’ Tell me about the decision-making and strategy behind this.
ZATARAIN: We were not intentional about our positioning for the first five years of the company because we didn't even know what brand pos... See more
ZATARAIN: We were not intentional about our positioning for the first five years of the company because we didn't even know what brand pos... See more
Polina Pompliano • How Eight Sleep Co-Founder Alex Zatarain Built a Company That Pioneered the ‘Sleep Fitness’ Category
I heard this quote from the writer Harold Brodkey who said, “I don’t understand privacy.” I’ve always understood privacy very well, but it’s like—what’s the point of taking your secrets to the grave, or even your banalities? We have this chance to let ourselves be known to other people, to fill out the web of humanity that we’ve been spreading for
... See moreOn the other side of creative aliveness, there is flatness. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, about what happens when our worlds go flat. The dynamism we lose, the emotional urges we suppress, the original impulses we become too afraid to nurture.
On the running path recently, a song came on. It was by Eminem. His music is not my choice for ... See more
On the running path recently, a song came on. It was by Eminem. His music is not my choice for ... See more
Leandra Medine Cohen • Notes from the running path
Leandra on anti-flatness
That’s my big learning of the year: understanding the way someone’s interior life translates to what they make. When I first started writing this Substack, I was possessed by the sense that I had to figure out “how to do it.” Which other Substacks do I like, which other Substacks are popular, what do they write about, how do they make it work. It’s... See more