Michael Brooks

“Sometimes fear does not subside and you must do it afraid.”

– Elisabeth Elliot

I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless, sometimes it’s cold or wet or windy and I’m retracing the same... See more

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding .1 Put simply:

• I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people

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A work of fiction is, in a sense, always “wrong.” It is a complicated organism. It is not, ever, an accurate or correct or true or 100 percent “defensible” representation of reality. It’s always somebody’s take on reality, full of inadvertent falseness (full of, that is, inadequate attempts to be truthful.)

“Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit

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Remember The New Yorker . You subscribed because you liked it. Then it taunted you with its endless words, pages and pages demanding to be read. It reminded you of all the time you didn’t have to spend reading The New Yorker . Whenever you glimpsed the growing pile, you felt mild panic. Every time you recycled an unread issue, you felt like a... See more

I heard on a Peloton ride (Jess King): It isn’t that no matter what you do that I will love you. I will love you no matter how I FEEL. And that is the hard, important work.