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We didn’t follow a playbook. We followed our instincts.
Reflecting on them has been the first step to dreaming bigger.
My career is a story of being drawn to studying people who were doing the thing they were meant to do.
Taste and touch—knowing what’s good, knowing what’s right, knowing what you want—evolve into essential, tactical skills that remain solely the privile
a principle is not a principle until it costs you something.
We’re all in this world for so little time. It’s a glimpse of a particle of a millisecond. One day, we think about something we want to do. The next d
you make good work when you let your guard down.
The thing to do is to be undeterred by trivial things, have conviction in our world view, and simultaneously be nimble enough to react to important ch
the answer wasn’t to coast or climb higher. It was to begin again
nearly everything worth paying attention to was made by someone who cared deeply about their craft. Caring enough to pursue mastery over years is how
At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.
Creating your own luck is an audacity game.
Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
But unlike irony and satire, taste is earnest. It doesn’t like to fake it and it can’t be too far removed from reality.
Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the wor
The question of swimming or not is not really about the water; it’s about doing or not doing things – things that are pleasant, joyful, and right for
It was overcast and smelled like the ocean and eucalyptus.
I'm not sure why you won't find writing like that in dictionaries these days, but you won't.
Like relishing embarrassment and pride alike, and having flowers around.
But as a writer you have to be willing to say, Yeah, that’s not good enough, over and over and over again.
Friction eroded poor execution and clumsy ideas until something simpler and more elegant was revealed.
The root of the word essay comes from the French essayer, meaning “to try.”
“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”
That return, to me, is important, and that that exists is a reason for me to do the work that I’m doing. I can’t really put words to it. It’s just a f
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” — David Foster Wallace
What I mean is that with its blunt authority the New Oxford definition of "pathos" -- "a quality that evokes pity or sadness" -- shuts down the conver
It is the decision to let yourself be undone by what draws you in.
I think that overlap, that shared percentage of language, is the real definition of velocity.
The ideal isn’t to erase the difference between design and engineering. Each side has its depth, taste, and craft. The goal is simpler: maintain a sha
I really believe that a piece of design should reward the second look, the slow encounter. Wit and beauty are the hooks, but subtlety is what keeps pe
“increase your inputs”
They want me to get a range of intermediate shots, close-ups and reverse angles, all for safety’s sake. But I have always filmed only what I need for
Like anything, it’s all in repetition. You go again and again, and the fear loses its grip on you.
So when you do go, and I hope you do, go with your flaws, your doubts, your boxes still unpacked. Go messy. Go late. Go unprepared. Go with nothing bu
For Mazzy, Mia and Lola. Always stare back. — Watching Women & Girls by Danielle Pender
For Daisy, for being there from the beginning. And for Henry, for promising to stay until the end. — Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
To my family, blood and spirit— All ghosts are queer. — Your Love Is Not Good by Johanna Hedva
For my mother and father. Please don’t read this. — Boy Parts by Eliza Clark
What I’m looking for when I ask people questions normally is something one of my producers calls “the look away,” which is when someone is going back
Conversations are more invigorating to me when we’re both using “I.”
A virtue of watching a movie on my laptop is that I can pause.
Did The Argonauts always begin as it does?
“To be in, not being in, this was always in me. I never fought against it.” — SAGG Napoli
because writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life
The gift of grief is a well-honed bullshit radar.There are many things you can fake or hide, including from yourself, but hitting rock bottom blows ev
at once precise and discursive, friendly and skeptical, direct and elliptical
Friendship was what taught me that love is an endurance sport with no finish line. You keep picking up the phone and sending your dumb texts and order
I don’t think I’m so good at that kind of friendship. My friendships, if they persist for long enough, have a way of getting weighty. But heaviness is
The most divine relationships constitute a messy, awkward collaboration between two savage souls who dare to ask for more from this world.
It’s not brave, because I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. It’s all I know how to do. I’ll go on making things and cooking and offering them and wanting
The future we are so worried about controlling begins to unfold smoothly, in a way it cannot when we are operating with such tension—always reaching,
But what we discovered by honing in clearly on what he genuinely wanted was that what he was (unconsciously) seeking was simply showing up with greate
I want a life where timelines bend to my becoming.
how do I let my aversions/curiosities actually take form, instead of just orbiting around them abstractly? I want to feel rooted, but with flexible li
“the sense that a detour can easily become a life” — Raven Leilani
And I thought about how funny these tiny coincidences are, threaded through our lives, through even our most inconsequential decisions. And I thought
There has also been so much unforeseen beauty when I embrace the path of lesser resistance and remain curious and engaged with the world around me rat
Anything worth preserving will carry over incidentally, and has, and the rest will fade away, making room for more.
We live in this place, in this world, where we can share our words but not our thoughts.
it’s not done because it’s perfect. It’s done because it’s done.
Well, you need dirt to grow plants. A farmer I admire once wrote that 90% of his job was dirt management. Manage the dirt well and the plants grow the
essentially, the way to succeed on YouTube is to start by making 100 videos, trying to make each one a little better than the last, and otherwise not
Suddenly you realize that you don’t have to know more. In fact, accepting that you’ll never know enough is a way of yielding yourself to the enchantme
“whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal”
The answer may not yet exist.
And when I practice letting go of how I think things are supposed to look and instead cultivate a trust in the unfolding that is taking place, often i
"If we are to be original thinkers, develop an honest style, write something sticky, that leaves a mark, we can't rely on imitation, or even competiti
"Everyone is in some way trying to be the same. Stay off of that. Develop yourself so you have your own voice. So that it's you they are looking for,
What if success is exactly what we think it is, versus what we are told?
To really like my work I have to look at it with different eyes. I have to forget everyone who did it better or faster, and remind myself that no one
