Rachel Lowenstein

“I am convinced, however that you gather vicarious experience best, not when you are honing up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you are pursuing it as an end in itself.”

― James Webb Young, A technique for producing ideas: A simple five step formula for producing ideas

“But the principle of constantly expanding your experience, both personally and vicariously, does matter tremendously in any idea-producing job. Make no mistake about it.”

― James Webb Young, A technique for producing ideas: A simple five step formula for producing ideas

emotional hygiene is recognizing the early symptoms of overstimulation and choosing not to intellectualize your way through them. it’s noticing the urge to self-diagnose, to decode, to debrief and instead, gently interrupting the loop. not to silence it, but to create room around it. so your nervous system has a chance to downshift before your... See more

I couldn’t understand why women were joining the ranks of the alt-right, which had in part grown out of it. Was this some kind of false consciousness? How could they disavow feminism while reaping its benefits for their cause? As I have come to discover, there is no single answer to these questions.

The sculptor Arturo di Modica ran away from his home in Sicily to go study art in Florence. He later immigrated to the US, working as a mechanic and a hospital technician to support himself while he did his art. Eventually he saved up enough to buy a dilapidated building in lower Manhattan, which he tore it down so he could illegally build his own... See more

when you take an ironic, negative, or numb attitude to everything, you are by definition not on the line for solutions, and when you stop looking for solutions, you lose all agency and will in your life.

A few years ago, I analyzed a bunch of data and found that all popular forms of art had become “oligopolies”: fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.