I’ve been thinking about the enduring, perhaps increasing currency of personal recommendations (practically artisanal craft now if you think about it!) as well as the value of connoisseurship and curation in a culture where unthinking automation has left us feeling drowned in a deluge of content.

I suspect that’s the core appeal of all the influenc... See more

Vulnerability in writing is a precision tool.“ If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known,” Tim Kreider wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that has since become a wildly popular Tumblr meme.

According to mimetic theory, others act as models of desire for us.

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral ob... See more

what I definitely believe is that the great religions, all of them and the great mystical traditions of Buddhism and Taoism, and so on, have central truths that they hold in common, and that these are a kind of wisdom that are not appreciated, unless one is brought up in a tradition that helped one see

them. And our tradition is dead against seeing

... See more

"Taoism gave me a handle on how to look at life and how to lead it when I was an adolescent hunting for ways to make sense of the world without going off into the God business."