Elena

And why shouldn’t we mix it up? Why shouldn’t writers follow their obsessions and interests and strange ideas? The result is almost always going to be more memorable than an unthinking devotion to plot beats and character arcs.

People read nonfiction to learn and to feel. My framework for ensuring a blog post accomplishes both is to start with a first draft that focuses on "novel" ideas.

A novel idea is one that's not just new to the reader, but also significant and not easily intuited. Think of it as new and worthwhile . I've identified five categories:

• Counter-intuitive —

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My generic career advice for young people is that if at all possible, you should aim to work on something that no one has a word for. Spend your energies where we don’t have a name for what you are doing, where it takes a while to explain to your mother what it is you do. When you are ahead of language, that means you are in a spot where it is mor

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sensuality is actually not what we can see. It's always about feeling, whether it's music, whether it's touch. And to increase our sort of consumption of sex, sensuality, we often close our eyes. But pornography is purely visual. And that's why pornography is not at all sensuous. That actually really disrupts our thinking about sex.

Rhizomatics is a philosophy trying to understand the organized complexity of knowledge in the current reality of infinite information and interconnections. Rhizomes are inherently organic in nature, where knowledge may change as connections change and as the network touches other networks. At the end of the day there is no absolute right or wrong,

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What we all unequivocally value, readers and writers, all of us as enjoyers of creativity, is the mind-expanding energy that’s only found in art, in any of its forms, as a means to share the things that make our minds alike and the things that make them different. AI systems can do many things but they can’t — and never will be able to — expand our... See more

in my experience, charm is found in the warmth of a touch, the ability to welcome someone into a conversation organically, the filling up someone’s water glass before your own, remembering details about someone’s family they forgot they told you about.... the goal of charm is to selflessly melt someone down into puddle of their best qualities so th... See more

Iwakan is one of my favorite Japanese phrases. It consists of three Chinese characters, 違 ( i , meaning difference, deviation), 和 ( wa , meaning harmony, peace) and 感 ( kan , meaning feeling, sense), that together form a single word that loosely translates as a ‘sense of disharmony’. In daily interactions, I use the term casually when something fee... See more

We have a tendency to think of earth as a closed system. it is not. we do not live in a sealed spacecraft, isolated from the environment in a convenient bubble of air. we travel rapidly through space and time with our windows open, constantly exposed to the complex ecology of the galaxy and all it contains. we are windblown. and, while one of the c... See more