Robin Good

While it’s probably one of the corniest things I’ll ever write in this column, I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not... See more

as the amount of slop increases — whether human or AI generated — the difficulty in finding the right stuff to read is only increasing

The more our world becomes measurable and quantifiable, the more we need spaces that preserve what can't be measured—the hunches we can't explain, the patterns we feel but can't prove.

Next come the megalomaniacs , who may be talented and motivated, but are bedeviled by a deadly overconfidence that ultimately renders them careless and unrigorous in their work. Cajal writes:

People with this type of failure are characterized by noble and winning traits. They study a great deal, but love personal activities as well. They worship

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This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increased, we began to see a larger volume of curators — coolhunters, just like Gladwell had outlined in ’97, but this time in a digital space. On Tumblr, this looked like blogs of curated art or photography; on Pinterest, we saw well-crafted... See more

Writing on methods for gathering ideas, Seneca, the great stoic, suggests that authors should imitate the bees. Like a bee flying among the flowers, we ought to vary our reading and extract useful material from various sources.

I get it. You pour your soul onto the page, and it’s crushing when no one seems to care. That’s human. But if you’re not careful, the need for validation starts steering the work.

You bend your tone. You chase trends. You lose the very thing that made you worth reading in the first place.

And the things is the more you write to grow , the less your... See more

According to Bourdieu (1979): ‘social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.’

In other words, social classes define their preferences,... See more