Michael Dean

I got the essay book “The Crack Up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald this week, but didn’t realize until yesterday that there are only 8 essays and it’s 75% logs that were too weird or random to make it into his published work.

Inspired by how Festing Jones organized Samuel Butler’s notebook, he did the same thing by organizing how own fragments under alphabe

complexity : timeless beauty.

We need to redefine complexity because it’s seen as a thing to avoid instead of a thing to chase. Simplicity gets all the attention; and it frames complexity as a sin. I think we’re confusing complexity for convolution (complexity gone wrong). I’d argue that complexity is the holy grail.

Nature, art, and technology all

“Nothing beats nature. There are no laws and I’m the king.” — My grandfather.

Do I actually want to build a network of NYC writers and publishers and have printed essay books and be in the New Yorker to convince people I’m making a career out of a trade that is usually fruitless, or is this all just old-world vanity? Why not just exist on Substack and be fine with that?

A phrase for feeling very guilty about something you did wrong that isn’t a huge deal (ie: I think I actually put dirty utensils in a pile of clean ones and created extra work for someone working at the local Gyro place. Maybe it’s their fault for putting a bin of clean utensils near the exit where a garbage should be, or maybe they’ll associate me

EB White:

“The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and ta

The cashier at the Union Square Barnes and Nobles told me that the essays books were on the 4th floor, but I didn't imagine how sparse the selection would be. I found 2 cases, 10 shelves total, something like 60 linear feat of essay book spines. I wondered if the 4th floor was a microcosm, and so I acted on my urge to count shelves to know precisel

“Scott Galloway calls the embrace of advertising "the original sin of the Internet," and I think he's right. The algorithms serve the business model, and because advertising on the Internet is both massive in scale and granular in precision, nobody has the same experience, commercial clicks driven by algorithmic matching become the goal, and bewild

Write an essay about the time I hand-stippled the front facade of Grand Central.

Creative non-fiction idea: time travel back to Harvard in 2003 and convince Mark Zuckerberg to not start Facebook.