Sasha Tan

Cameron, you’ve said that when you’re not feeling particularly creative, you listen to a song, or watch a movie, or read a book, and before long you get “the urge to respond.” We typically hear the creative act described as, you know, there’s a void, and a flash of lighting cracks through it. But I really like that idea of response as intrinsic to... See more

Jack Dorsey on identifying the right details:

“Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.”

I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.

I probably sound like one of those guys who is always like, “AI will never do this , or I’ll eat my hat!!” and then he has to get his stomach pumped because it’s full of hats.

Lots of people worry that AI will replace human writers. But I know something the computer doesn’t know, which is what it feels like inside my head. There is no text, no .jpg, no .csv that contains this information, because it is ineffable. My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it.

(William Wordsworth referred to this as... See more

When you learn something about a writer, say, that Rousseau abandoned all of his children, it inflects the way you understand their writing. But even that isn’t quite the right example—it’s not about filling in the biographical details, it’s about realizing that the thing you’re reading comes from somewhere. Good writing is thick with that... See more

Something moved them, irked them, inspired them, possessed them, and then electricity shot everywhere in their brain and then—crucially—they laid fingers on keys and put that electricity inside the computer. Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring.