Lani Assaf

People who don't pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waiting for the other person to be done so they can say what’s rattling around inside. The body is slower, needs more time, and then words bubble up organically, one after another, without planning. People ... See more

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