Sublime

The first good thing about Substack is there’s no canceling. A young, talented heterodox thinker doesn’t have to worry that less talented conformists in his or her organization will use ideology as an outlet for their resentments. The next good thing is there are no ads, just subscription revenue. Online writers don’t have to chase clicks by writin... See more

Once you go viral, the temptation is to decipher the formula for how to do it again. Unfortunately, what’s interesting is not always popular. Furthermore, trying to manufacture virality is a surefire way to create saccharine writing and, eventually, cull your own creative vision. Too often, I think we sacrifice slow, chewy art for attention. 

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AMANDA MONTELL: I really appreciated this video from Kurzgesagt, which articulates how the current hyper-connected state of the internet has destroyed our collective mental health. The video suggested the glory days of social media were actually the early 2000s, when like-minded users could gather in niche, siloed forums to discuss common interests... See more

The Browser is a daily newsletter from someone who reads 1,000 articles a day, choosing his five favorites and sending them out with a short summary. Oftentimes, these linked articles don’t have a paywall of their own at all — but subscribers of The Browser pay to have them sent in a curated list.

And so the internet’s latest shining promise of creative autonomy denatures into another burnout-inducing hamster-wheel game of keep up, as Gimlet executive Reyhan Harmanci noted recently.

The internet hasn’t killed eccentricity but it makes it harder for anyone who lives (at least partly) online to live a specific life. The internet either crushes specificity, mocks it, ignores it, assimilates and commodifies it, or all of the above. It leads to a personality type that Henry James described in The Wings of the Dove: “You're familiar... See more