Lani Assaf

In the old days—old days for us anyway—when you were doing the washing up or mowing the lawn, you’d have time to think. And these days, we increasingly seem to be accomplishing these tasks with headphones on, with YouTube and podcasts. So are these inputs helping us think? Or are we stopping ourselves thinking by importing other people’s thoughts, ... See more

not every scent moves me the way that another 13 did when i smelled it for the first time. it’s subtle, it’s atmospheric- a quiet presence that lingers like a half-remembered dream. it’s intimate yet expansive, addictive, sensual and esoteric, yet deeply familiar. this is a scent for those who reject small talk in favor of conversations that stretc... See more

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that in San Francisco I’ve made close friends who have had very unusual lives where they’ve sought a lot of autonomy and the way they see their relationships, their lives, and the world has helped me become open to pursuing something unorthodox, too. People choose places; places shape people; people go on to shape ... See more

Resilience means enduring. It also means absorbing a whole lot of excess shit in your body — in your hair, in your back, in your joints — in ways you can’t always understand.

What about middle-aged women in the 19th century?

In a way, there were none. The critic Sari Edelstein, in her 2019 book “Adulthood and Other Fictions,” encourages readers to think about adulthood not as a biological fact but as a cluster of political rights and privileges conferred on some people in the U.S. – usually white men – and largely withh... See more

Then everything changed. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new bourgeois class that, when not reeling from the latest market crash, had time and money to burn.

Middle-class leisure, unlike the aristocratic kind that greeted one at birth, required shifting gears, from a full-steam-ahead search for one’s place in the world to the relative stag... See more

some people, unable or unwilling to replace what they have lost, simply learn to live with the absence, with the empty space where belief once was. they carry it like a phantom limb, something once vital that still aches despite its disappearance. they may no longer kneel in prayer, but they still move through the world as though waiting for an ans... See more

the truth is when you're posting online it's to a really specific vibration of people, and everyone who gets mad about it is simply eavesdropping from another vibration , and you have to just get over it and keep talking to your energy gang

The internet hasn’t killed eccentricity but it makes it harder for anyone who lives (at least partly) online to live a specific life. The internet either crushes specificity, mocks it, ignores it, assimilates and commodifies it, or all of the above. It leads to a personality type that Henry James described in The Wings of the Dove: “You're familiar... See more