Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Last Year My Mind Exploded and Now I'm in Spiritual Puberty Again
Sasha Chapinsashachapin.substack.comRunning a newsletter like DD is, at its core, an expression of taste. It’s me saying, ‘Here’s what I think deserves your attention this week.’ A process that Stepfanie Tyler describes beautifully in her piece on taste as the new intelligence:
“Curation is care. It says: I thought about this. I chose it. I didn’t just repost it. I didn’t just regurgi... See more
“Curation is care. It says: I thought about this. I chose it. I didn’t just repost it. I didn’t just regurgi... See more
When you were interested in playing with artifice and trying on different personas, was that ever psychologically destabilizing? Absolutely. At a certain point, I just completely lost touch with reality. I was falling so deeply into the fantasy of my artwork and my stage persona that I lost touch. I wouldn’t say that falling deeper into a life of b... See more
David Marchese • Lady Gaga’s Latest Experiment? Happiness.
And that was the first real, unsettling realization: I had let the internet be the mirror that told me who I was. I had spent so long performing myself online that without social media, I wasn’t sure how to measure my own existence. What is a life unposted? What are thoughts that no one else can hear? Who am I, if not a series of updates and images... See more
Nobody could reach my true self—my mind—which resided elsewhere. My true self was the brain that consumed books in bed each morning with an absorption so deep I often forgot to eat. And yet this “real” self was so ephemeral. It existed in perfect isolation, without witness, and seemed to change from one day to the next.
Meghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Again, I’m picking on Scott for reasons. The same is true of every other essayist I love. Sam Kriss at his best provides catharsis; at his worst, a sense of jaded superiority. Ted Gioia at his best makes me fall in love with art and music as if for the first time; at his worst, like I’m part of a small culturally-literate elite in a crumbling world... See more
Confessions of a Cringe Soy Redditor
What Mangione ultimately believed in was an ideology of personal optimisation. This is what’s left after all politics have been exhausted, the 2010s left and the 2020s right. There’s still the relentless need to improve something, but it’s no longer directed outwards. As we’ve discovered, another world is not actually possible, but there are ways t... See more
There’s clearly something in the air because The Atlantic just published Derek Thompson’s cover story on “the anti-social century,” which explores why Americans are spending more time than ever alone. And last week The Guardian published a piece about the rise in flakiness, with one person interviewed saying, “I have adjusted my mindset so I almost... See more