things i always knew to be true

The very word slip suggests some sort of movement; you can't slip, after all, if you’re standing still.

If you are an adult who still wants to write, it’s because you want to be heard. Feeling as if no one hears you, for a prolonged period of time, can lead to a kind of desperation, a kind of intense entitlement.

research shows that those who ask follow-up questions are better liked by their conversation partners

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

With big technology companies working hard to get us to use — and trust — their products, they have an interest in rhetoric that makes their products come across as not just human-like but as human-like in ways that support our goals; they’re leaning into this particularly hard with AI models that generate language. To call big technology companies... See more