Maria Potoroczyn

There’s kind of a mantra in journalism that you don’t actually have writer’s block, you’re just not done reporting. I think that that’s true for every kind of writing. Sometimes you try to write an essay and you’re getting blocked and blocked and blocked, and the problem isn’t that you have writer’s block; it’s that you haven’t fully emotionally... See more

She also shared that someone very close to her was losing their cognitive functions due to dementia and this was consuming her. She felt that it was the most horrible thing. She knew a bit about my work and so she asked what I thought about the whole thing—the fact that we could lose our minds as we aged. I didn’t know what to say exactly so I... See more

When the U.S. Air Force developed rocket planes that could break the sound barrier, the pilots who flew them kept dying.

As planes reached speeds near Mach 2, pilots would lose control due to the thinner air in the upper atmosphere. As Tom Wolfe describes in his book The Right Stuff:

“A plane could skid into a flat spin… and then start tumbling, not... See more

We can fret over the wildness of the news all we want, more crazy shit can and will happen, and you are still going to get a stomach ache after eating Chipotle. The perfect mixture of breathwork, sex, psychedelics, and funky music won’t make you enlightened or clear your eczema. Your neighbor’s ratchety garage door will still throttle your white... See more

Taste comes in lanes. To quote Susan Sontag again, “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good... See more

When we recognize true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul.