On interesting

Rereading is training, practice for remaking and unmaking—and, yes, razing—the world. Rereading draws your best thoughts close, keeps them at the ready, prepares you to think thoughts with them, prepares you to act with them at hand. Your favorite reads are your armor and your weapons and your shelter all in one. What have you gathered about you? W... See more

The British sociologist Marilyn Strathern ... taught me that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with).” ... It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots; what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions,

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Reread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which yo... See more

I made a decision many years ago to shape my work around the books I read. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t recall spending a lot of time thinking about that decision or contemplating the consequences of it. It seemed right and so I ran with it. But it has since given rise to a kind of scholarship and writing that I’m not sure I would have l... See more

As a teenager, I read guitar magazines not because I could play guitar or was a particularly talented musician but because I liked the technicalities they would explain. Regular music magazines talked about everything around the music; I wanted to get inside it. I haven’t played a violin in years but I still long to get inside the music, to inhabit... See more

an Information Billionaire

The only way I found to resist that homogenized view of the world was to make myself part of something larger than myself.

People often ask me how I got the courage to put my work into the world.

I’m not sure I have any courage, but I do have rage .

This may come as a surprise to readers of my books, who tell me they’re rather helpful and upbeat. (Not words my friends and family might necessarily use to describe me!)

My secret is: the books are positive because I take a n... See more

“If your world is not enchanted, you’re not paying attention.”

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything wi... See more