“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

―

John Berger

Some might call this concatenation of elements a “vibe”: something that’s difficult to pin down precisely in words but that’s evoked by a loose collection of ideas, concepts, things that can be identified by intuition rather than by a prescribed logic.

Six months ago, I looked up how to humanely euthanize a sick fish on Reddit. I found a method and now my fish is dead.

Since then, Reddit has sent an email every week with novel ways to kill fish of all sizes.

The algorithm must think I’m a fish mass murderer. It won’t stop.

Metaphors are slippery, like memory. But then, putting things to words is always a translation, an approximation of the thing. There’s perhaps no better reminder of that than our inability to describe the sensation of scent, its transportability, what it feels like and means to us. As Epstein suggests, the mind and memory are equally inarticulable ... See more

What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, an... See more

One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing wh... See more

ideas do not like to be treated as if they were lifeless, inanimate objects (would you?) and therefore they gravitate towards minds that treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve.