The New Romantics

I do not want to be in the business of manipulating your split-second attention.

The people we traditionally consider to be smartest are those best at some sort of a general math / reasoning ability.

This is not what genius is.

It is a mistake and a misreading of nature to think that you, a living creature, will be flourishing all the days of your life.

She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales... See more

“Once you learn how to learn, you have only to discover what is worth learning.”

Do we need to practice being human again?

When I had the flip phone, I had to put in effort to get to places, to talk to people. Everything was a task. Now it’s easy to do things. I guess I still don’t like needing the crutch of a smartphone, though I couldn’t figure out how to go on without one.”

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when... See more