michael-dean-k/

A goal of mine has to read the majority of the Bible—New and Old Testaments—by next Easter, which means I need to start soon, next month, September, and carve out 15 hours per month or so. My original plan was too simple. I decided on the The Oxford Annotated 5th edition, but that has limitations. It's academic and “non-confessional,” meaning, it’s not any particular church’s perspective; it’s the best in terms of secular scholarship, and is the standard in Ivy league religious departments. It’s probably great for the historical perspective, but it doesn’t include the other perspectives at all.

I do want to contemplate the allegorical, typological, and moral angles of the Bible too, but my decision is whether I want (1) a single perspective (the Orthodox perspective), (2) no perspective (so I’m forced to derive my own), or (3) a range of perspectives (which I would have to critically triangulate). Each approach would offer something different. I already have Kallistos Ware on my reading list—on theology, on the church, on the Philokalia: focused on Orthodox prayer—but all that doesn't include the Orthodox angle on the Bible.

I'm not necessarily looking for a traditional Orthodox outlook, but rather an Orthodox foundation for a personal and idiosyncratic outlook. I think creative liberty in interpretation is how to best engage with a religious text.

This ties into an idea I have about seeing religion through the three lenses of philosophy: ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. I find myself agreeing with the ethics and metaphysics of Orthodoxy (how to live, and the nature of reality), but disagreeing with the epistemology of religion in general; epistemology is about how we attain knowledge, and most religions are anchored in fixed answers to life’s biggest mysteries. (...Yes, even within a sealed worldview, there is still work to do in building a personal relationship with the material, but this does not include doubting the core dogmas...). My view is that the deepest form of spiritual practice comes from tolerating ambiguity and directly grappling with the mysteries; this involves questioning central axioms, inventing original interpretations, and extending scripture forward.

Here's the latest game plan on how to achieve this—it involves five different Bibles:

• I found three specialized translations (one for the Old Testament, one for the Gospels, another for Acts/Letters/Revelations) that are most faithful to the original linguistic intent. They’re translated by philologists/classicists/philosophers. After reading samples from a bunch, I found these to be the most literary and engaging to read. I’ll read these without commentary, and take notes with my own interpretations.

  • The Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter (2019);
  • The Gospels by Sarah Ruden (2021);
  • The New Testament by David Bentley Hart (2023);

• After reading a book (ie: Genesis), I’ll read the The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Fifth Edition), but only for the historical introduction for that book (ie: Genesis has about 10 pages, where the Orthodox Study Bible only has 2). The Oxford commentary felt a little too unstructured and pedantic, though I imagine for some books, I will dive in.

• Before moving onto the next book, I’ll read the commentary from The Orthodox Study Bible. In addition to line-by-line commentary, it also has short essays which I found great for synthesizing everything. This gives the frame for my church and the specific religious tradition I grew up in.

The value in this process is: (1) I start with the source text, without commentary, meaning I get to record my own idiosyncratic first impressions; but then, really, (2) I compare those impressions with a range of sources that don't agree. This ties to some good general reading advice I recently heard: simultaneously read books on a topic that have diverging conclusions. There's a tension when three different books interpret Genesis differently. Is the snake the devil? By levitating above any singular perspective, but taking all sides seriously, I can build a better understanding of the hyper-object (rather than a fixed perspective).

The syllabus: (NT = New Testament; OT = Old Testament; DSS = Dead Sea Scrolls)

• August 2026: (430 pages)
  • The Gospel of Mark (NT)—145 pages
  • Psalms, Book I (OT)—155 pages
  • The Book of Isaiah, Ch. 40-55 (OT)—130 pages
• September 2026: (500 pages)
  • Genesis (OT)—425 pages
  • Psalms, Book IV (OT)—75 pages
• October 2026: (440 pages)
  • Exodus (OT)—365 pages
  • Psalms, Book II (OT)—130 pages
• November 2026: (525 pages)
  • Samuel 1-2 (OT)—445 pages
  • Ecclesiastes (OT)—80 pages
• December 2026: (480 pages)
  • Letters of Paul, T,G,C2,R,Pp,Pm (NT)—330 pages
  • Damascus Document (DSS)—25 pages
  • Habakkuk (OT) + Habakkuk Pesher (DSS)—40 pages
  • Psalms, Book III (OT)—85 pages
• January 2027: (550 pages)
  • The Gospel of Matthew (NT)—225 pages
  • Deuteronomy, Ch. 1-11, 27-34 (OT)—120 pages
  • The Book of Jeremiah, Ch 1, 7, 11, 28-44 (OT)—160 pages
  • The Minor Prophets, Micah—45 pages
• February 2027: (525 pages)
  • The Gospel of Luke (NT)—240 pages
  • Acts (NT)—225 pages
  • Minor Prophets, Jonah (OT)—15 pages
  • Minor Prophets, Joel (OT)—30 pages
  • The Community Rule (DSS)—15 pages
• March 2027: (425 pages)
  • The Gospel of John (NT)—185 pages
  • The Gospel of Thomas (DSS)—30 pages
  • Proverbs (OT)—210 pages
• April 2027: (495 pages)
  • The Book of Ezekiel, Ch 1-3, 8-11, 18, 33-39, 43, 47 (OT)—130 pages
  • Minor Prophets, Zechariah (OT)—80 pages
  • The War Scroll (DSS)—20 pages
  • Psalms, Book V (OT)—140 pages
  • The Revelation of John (NT)—125 pages

The imagination is as ugly as it is beautiful; they come together. If your inner mind consists only of pretty landscapes, imagined scenarios, and clever compromises, all bound by a safe and familiar virtue, your net is cast not below the froth of the ocean. To dive into the depths is to expose yourself not just to shimmering coral, but to the jump scares of stingrays. The moment I thought this, as I lifted my arm to drink orange juice, I saw a monstrous bug on my sleeve, hairy and hissing; it was only a bee, but unexpectedly there, and so I leapt and shooed and booted into my aboriginal fight mode. What a synchronicity! You are not tapped into the Source unless the fear of it lifts you off the ground.

This is on my mind because I had a strange fantasy on my walk home—a fruit of imagination—and debated myself on whether I’d write about it. I decided I wouldn’t, but I suppose, now, here I am. I will spare you of the hot specifics, which unwillingly formed in my mind. Contrary to how you may think this started, I was looping a religious mantra and I saw with total purity, closer to Buddha than the drools of a leg-humping dog. My sin was not in lust, but in congratulating myself on my discipline. I imagined myself writing a paragraph on this victory of inner-chastity—“I didn’t imagine [X]… I didn’t imagine [Y]...”—but that summoned a fantasy weirder than usual, one with unbelievable metaphors that I’ll never put to paper, and an arc that ended in spasms, shapeshifting, and shrinking into a mono-droning ball of white heat that exploded and shattered the windows of nearby houses, spiraling the town into a front-lawn frenzy.

Creativity comes not without deviance; and so extreme creativity comes with flashes of imagery that will shock you, shock whoever you share it with. It cares not of your preferences or values, commitments or morals; to cast a line deep into waters brings all sorts of riches and squids to the surface of your mind, and the choice is yours on what to bring into the boat (and of course, sometime a whale emerges, and your language fails you, leaving you only able to speak of the whale with nothing to show).

A more conservative mind has no such problems, because a conservative dares not enter the mind of God. To be creative is not a frivolous hobby, it is to be a microcosm of the larger engine of creation. And if being creative involves attuning yourself to the instability of imagination, then one can’t know God without a fair amount of psychic turbulence.

(I promise I won’t stray too far into amateur theology here.) The popular caricature of God is the archetype of an architect—one with a divine “plan”—but a better image is a thunderous volcanic eruption. The Big Bang, the rupture of cosmic seed; reproduction—evolution, life, and creation, in many places at many scales —emerges from billions of scattered instances, so that the rare two can fuse into a higher order. I have trouble believing God has consciousness, intention, and agency, but find obvious a divine intelligence that folds chaos into order. The cost of divine intelligence though, in creating something as magnificent as a human, is misfiring, mutation, bad combinations, and all things upsetting—violence, death, and evil.

So if we want to carry the logos, hold the flame of divine intelligence in our own head to make beautiful things ourselves, to continue the process of God, as God, then we have to accept defects and abortions—to not cower in fear at the strange and grotesque, to not turn off the lights. This is probably a known truth, that the path towards Enlightenment runs through dark woods, but you forget that in a fit of terror from your own thoughts. This is at least, my rationalization of the stray and unexplainable thoughts that occasionally pass through me, thoughts of lust, violence, theft, vengeance, conspiracy, tyranny, hauntedness—all demonic antipodes to the dearest things I treasure.

Instead of narrowing the aperture of mind and retreating to shore, I have to learn to swim. I can go into the depths and marvel at weird creatures, but not grab a fin to follow where it goes. This is where I think “Self-Reliance” by Emerson goes wrong; he is right in the sense that you have to take seriously whatever is presented through your natural imagination, but wrong in the sense that you must follow all of nature’s impulses, wherever they lead. Nature produces mutations, Ralph. The decision on how to respond to the mental fruits of nature is where morality lives. Morality is not a purity of mind, nor is it the total absence of evil, but it’s the character you show when dealing with darkness. I can’t be blamed for trying this, for it’s in my name; Michael—“he who fights the Devil.”

A simple maxim might be something like “don’t chase it, don’t avoid it, let it wash through.” One complication is being a writer. Odd thoughts often make for good material. One view is that writing is a useful release valve, a controlled plane where monsters can roam, keeping the head pure when away from the page. But if your best writing comes forth from the ugly imagination, then you’ll find yourself calling upon it as your Muse.

Join Essay Club and meet with us on Mondays at 7pm ET to read and talk about these classics:

• David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (June 22nd)
• Leslie Jamison, "The Empathy Exams" (June 29th)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (July 6th)
• Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp" (July 13th)
• Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Homeschool" (July 20th)
• Michel de Montaigne, "To philosophize is to learn how to die" (July 27th)
• Virginia Woolf, "Street Haunting" (August 3rd)
• George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant" (August 10th)
• E.B. White, "Once More to the Lake" (August 17th)
• Jo Anne Beard, "The Fourth State of Matter" (August 24th)
• Joan Didion, "Goodbye To All That" (August 31st)
• G.K. Chesterton, "On Lying in Bed" (September 8th, *Tuesday)

I finally got around to building my fiction syllabus. In pursuit of the question, "how should an essay writer read?", I'm mapping out all the different ways I want to educate myself. One of them, reading and analyzing essays, is obvious and underway, the bulk of Essay Architecture. But the 2nd focus was focused on nonfiction curators, historians, and biographers—I already shared that list. Now this 3rd focus is fiction.

This list started with some big bad novels, like Moby Dick, Middlemarch, and Infinite Jest. Realistically, if I were to pursue any one of those, they'd likely suck the oxygen away from anything else I'm reading. My current approach to read something like 10 books per month, not in full, but 1-3 chapters from each, coordinated among each other. I could possibly read something like Infinite Jest over 6 months, but I imagine I would lose a lot from going in and out, and often lose context of what I read last month. Maybe there's a way where, for one month a year, I block out the whole month to read something very long. For now, going to skip that (I can experiment with long books after this already ambitious system proves it can sustain for 1-2 years).

And so this limited my fiction criteria to things I could knock out in a few days. Decided to run with short novels and novellas (100-200 words) and also short-story collections (where I'd select a few that can be read in a similar span). I like this approach because it gives me a wide range of different voices and approaches to world-building, character building, etc. Where the essay is anchored in the questioning of the author, and nonfiction is anchored in ideas, fiction is anchored in the confluence of people and place, and the implicit virtues you parse out from the circumstance.

You can get the whole reading list on syllabus for $208.

• Atwood, Stone Mattress, 2014 (Alphinland, Revenant, Dark Lady, The Dead Hand Loves You = 130p) $9
• Balle, On the Calculation of Volume Part I, 2024 (160p) $10
• Borges, Ficciones, 1944 (The Library of Babel, Funes the Memorious, The Garden of Forking Paths, The Imortal, Death and the Compass = 64p) $8
• Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories, 1995 (Bloodchild, Speech Sounds, The Evening and the Morning and the Night, Amnesty = 115p) $9
• Chekhov, Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, 2002 (A Boring Story, The Darling, The Man in a Case, Gooseberries = 86p) $11
• Chiang, Stories of Your Life, 2002 (Story of Your Life, Understand, Hell Is the Absence of God = 100p) $9
• Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, 2009 (Break It Down, Story, The Thirteenth Woman, Kafka Cooks Dinner, Varieties of Disturbance, We Miss You & selected shorts = 80p) $15
• Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, 1843 (90p) $6
• Dostoyevsky, The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground, The Peasant Marey, A Gentle Creature, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man = 176p) $7
• Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1744 (130p) $3
• Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 1938 (Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Indian Camp, Big Two-Hearted River, Old Man at the Bridge, A Day's Wait, Now I Lay Me, The Gambler the Nun and the Radio, Cross-Country Snow (104p) $17
• Hesse, Siddhartha, 1922 (150p) $4
• Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759 (120p) $5
• Joyce, Dubliners, 1914 ("The Dead", "Araby" "The Sisters" "A Painful Case" "Eveline" "Counterparts" "A Little Cloud" "Clay") " (111p) $1
• Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 1915 (75p) $9
• Kerouac, The Subterraneans, 1958 (110p) $10
• Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real, 2012 (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, The Wife's Story, Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight, Nine Lives, Vaster Than Empires and More Slow = 150p) $10
• Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001 (The Bear Came Over the Mountain, Family Furnishings, = 68pp) $7
• Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, 1965 (The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Flowering Judas, Theft, Noon Wine, Pale Horse Pale Rider = 135p) $16
• Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illyich and Other Stories, 1866 (The Death of Ivan Illyich, Father Sergius, Alyosha the Pot, Hadji Murat = 232) $14
• Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House, 1968 (Harrison Bergeron, Welcome to the Monkey House, Long Walk to Forever, Miss Temptation, All the Kings Horses, Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog, New Dictionary, More Stately Mansions, Report on the Barnhouse Effect, The Euphio Question, Unready to Wear, The Kid Nobody Could Handle, EPICAC, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow = 168p) $6
• Wallace, Oblivion (Good Old Neon, Another Pioneer, The Soul is Not a Smithy = 105p) $10
• Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 (190p) $6
• Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925 (190p) $7

I asked Claude about the running themes: awakening late in life, the divided/counterfeit self, free will, the dignity of ordinary people, the sacredness of attention, and memento mori as a clarifying lens. Many are anchored in a single day. Some try to synthesize virtues, others accept a messy plurality. I also asked "how might I change after reading this?" and it replied: "you'll re-weigh the ordinary day"; you'll get a sharper instrument for self-deception"; "you'll relocate ethics from achievement to attention and kindness"; "mortality becomes a working tool, not a fear."

What and how you read should heavily depend on what your goal is. Outputs shape inputs. When someone insists you go back to read The Great Books, in order, in their entirety, they're giving you bad advice. It's not that those books aren't great—I hope to read Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno and Finnegan's Wake and the Odyssey before I die— the problem is it's too generic a suggestion. To spend thousands of hours deep in the canon will obviously change you, but that's equivalent of throwing a beginner into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, hoping they'll figure it out, with no sense of what their goals are.

If your goal is to write essays (every day, week, or month), then you're reading diet should look very different from a philosopher, professor, or researcher. You might not need to be a professional reader, but you should still strive to be a serious one. 3-4 hours a day might not be feasible, but 30-60 minutes per day through an intentionally selected list of sources will slowly build maps of material to fuse into your work.

If you're an essayist, you read so that concepts, forms, feelings, and words are always within reach from an idea of your own. It's no use quoting Aristotle from memory if you can't bend Aristotle to augment an original idea of your own.

It's time to make a syllabus. I've been guilty my whole life of haphazardly reading books and essays as I come across them, but now that I'm over 5 years into writing essays, I feel it's time to be more intentional. This essay is the artifact of me mapping out what, why, and how I'll be reading in the next 2-3 years. I've broken it into four practices: reading for ideas, reading for craft, reading for words, reading for feeling.

Reading for ideas

Since essays are so personal, it's very possible to draw from nothing else than the bank of your own life experience. Memory is absolutely one realm of material, but also, it helps to pull concepts from the world around you, in your time and in all times before. Anyone is exposed to some sliver of culture, and I suppose you could just rely on that. But there's another path which involves actively educating yourself.

Before I dive into the details of philosophy or history, I'm going to build a map. I want to go wide, not deep, because my existing maps are too fuzzy. ie: Who was Thomas Aquinas? Who influenced him, who did he influence, and could I hand write an essay on three of his big ideas? Until I can do that with 100 figures from antiquity to now, all interconnected in a web, I'm not prepared to dive into any Great Book. It would be a tremendous waste of time, for me at this moment in my life, to read The Leviathan by Hobbes in full, especially when I could read 30 pages on it from Alan Ryan, a philosopher-curator, whose prose is 400 years more modern, and who can contextualize old ideas into the full history. In the time I could finish one book from Hobbes, I could read Ryan's entire textbook and know 30 different thinkers at much higher resolution than I know now. By the end, I'll have an updated index on the history of political philosophy, and maybe I'll know that—based on my current writings—it makes more sense to dive into Rousseau in full.

How would my mind be different if I found and read the best curator across every field?

There's a specific kind of book I'm looking for to update my maps. It's not a textbook. It's similar in it's encyclopedic range, except it is slanted by a thesis, animated through a fervent voice, and concerned with the psychology behind the person known for an idea (instead of just biographical facts). Each chapter focuses on a figure for 25-50 pages, which feels like the right level of immersion. It might take 2 hours, compared to 20 hours for the source, and 20 seconds for Claude. While AI can surface historical ideas perfectly suited for your working draft, the problem is you outsourcing your recall. The recommendations are mechanical, impersonal, and worst of all, disembodied: you can't do it in your own head. By reading a sharp longform essay on Aquinas, his ideas will crystallize in my head and load into my subconscious; I'll know when he's relevant to my ideas at the layer of thinking itself.

The nudge to read all of Aquinas from scratch, on principle, is like asking a software developer to derive Internet standards from scratch instead of using libraries and plug-ins. For any thinker that matters, there's at least one person who spent a good deal of their life deeply understanding the source and distilling the concepts for you.

I'm going to share my working list, but the main caveat here is I'm not going in any particular order, and it's not necessary to read cover-to-cover. In any given month I'll be reading 1-2 chapters from 10 of these 24 books. In 45 minutes per day, I can get through most of this by the end of 2028 (2.5 years from now). Everything was published within the last one hundred years, and the whole thing costs $327.

• Literature: Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Book and School of the Ages (1994) $11
• Essays: Karshan & Murphy, On Essays (2020) $27
• Architecture: Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980) $15
• Arts: Kenneth Clark, Civilization (1969) $3
• Design, Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (1971), $34
• Poetry: Nineteenth Century American Poetry (1996) $9
• Politics: Alan Ryan, On Politics (2012) $15
• History: William & Ariel Durant, Lessons of History (1968) $14
• Economics: Richard Heilbroner, Worldly Philosophers (1953)
• Science: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) $11
• Mathematics: Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1980)
• Technology: Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (2014) $17
• Media: Denis D. Cali, Mapping Media Ecology (2017) $47
• Cosmology: Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (2011) $5
• Philosophy: Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1945) $8
• Psychology: Morton Hunt, The Story of Psychology (1993) $12
• Antiquity: Arthur Hugh Clough, Plutarch's Lives (Volumes I and II) (2018) $10
• Religion: Huston Smith, The World's Religions (1958) $12
• Christianity: Fifth Edition, The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha (2018) $16
• Orthodoxy: Kalliostes Ware, The Orthodox Way (1979) $10
• Mythology: Mircea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion (1949) $17
• Esoterica: Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928) $1
• Hermeticism: Franz Bardon, Initiation into Hermetics (1956) $20
• Death: The Oxford Book of Death (1983) PDF

You'll notice that all the links above are Kindle. This is because I want to have my highlights as atomic markdown files. The goal is not to read, but to write! Mapping and reading is just the setup so that I can read through and find highlights that spark original reactions. Montaigne's whole idea was to talk to his library, to be in conversation with the past through his books. And so the goal here is not to finish X books per year, but to produce original material. This is close to sounding like a Zettlekasten, but I should clarify that I don't plan to meticulously arrange my private highlights. A highlight is simply a prompt for an original paragraph that will immediately live on my website.

Other ways to read

I haven't spent as much time mapping out the other three modes, so I'll cover them briefly below, knowing I'll expand them later.

• Reading for craft: If you writing essays, then reading them is how you learn through osmosis. It's where you pick up on the patterns on form and voice, consciously and subconsciously. My thinking here is to pick one essayists per week, read as much I'm inspired to, and move on. It's important to cycle here, because hanging too long on any one writer might lock you into a particular influence without realizing. I'm planning a summer syllabus for Essay Club so we can do this as a group.
• Reading for words: Two years ago, I got really into reference books: dictionaries, usage dictionaries, the thesaurus, etymology, and even specialized dictionaries (on architecture, philosophy, scientific concepts). Sometimes I'd read cover to cover (futile), and others I'd practice words in ANKI. Expanding your vocabulary is seen is a pretentious thing to do today, when so much is geared towards simplicity and accessibility. Won't a rare word alienate the average user in your audience? No, because in the right context, ambitious words can increase the resolution in how you describe something. There's a joy in searching for words, but again, this comes back to returning to them repeatedly until it's actually coming through your prose.
• Reading for feeling: Novels and poetry are less about collecting bits to synthesize into your work. This is more an act of expanding your understanding of how words can make you feel. Less about analysis, more about immersion.

Where do I have to grow? Not just as a writer, but a thinker, and more importantly, a person? It’s dangerous to stop asking this question; it’s too easy to see yourself as fully matured, individuated and at your edge. Even the self-labeled "curiosity seekers" may unknowingly confine themselves to a shape. We identify with our skills and clumsiness, our knowledge and gaps, and assume these as static traits of our nature. From the other end, someone once told me there’s nothing they could learn from fiction, since they have no doubts on who they are. Can you not have both? To propel forward with confidence on your proven strengths, but also with the humility that you have much to learn? I am grateful for how architecture school set off an explosive inner drive in me, and certainly do feel I've cultivated a unique way of seeing things, but surely I'm blind in ways I can't see, with some habits I must have gotten very wrong, and if continued unfixed, will clamp me down from greatness.

Greatness! I shouldn't be shy to admit what I strive for, to feel the subtle pressure to play down my quest for complete, utter, spine-chilling mastery as a cool and casual endeavor. What is the root of this? Maybe I can tell you but I will likely be guessing and justifying.

One guess is that I've been receptive/perceptive to feel the viscerality of great works—in architecture, music, writing—and it feels to me there's no greater ability than being able to do that myself. This isn't unique to me of course, it's possibly what drives at least half of artists, but I imagine many people are content experiencing art in all its fullness with no desire of making it themselves (no desire to make, or to recreate that experience in others).

I know it’s vain (and dangerous) to want extrinsic fame, and more measured to do things for the love of it, intrinsically. But if it were purely intrinsic, would I not just journal and take my words to the grave? I could riffed on the intrinsic benefits—ie: it simply feels like great to pick something you enjoy and commit to improving through your whole life—but also, if you take that idea seriously, it’s not enough to just enjoy it uncritically, because your blind spots may prevent you from reaching your greatest internal heights.

This makes it worthwhile to understand the caliber of the minds and lives around you, and throughout history, to estimate yours in relation to theirs. Of course, "comparison is the thief of joy," but there's a way to get feedback without letting it consciously or subconsciously crush you. I imagine a reasonable person just makes an assumption, that someone they're inspired by is just made differently. Instead, we each have a range of extreme and unreasonable actions available to us, that if we act upon consistently for years, can evolve us out of one head and into another.

There’s a level of contradiction here, where I’m totally happy writing in obscurity as a suburban dad, and it’s fine if no one but my daughter ever reads my work, and also I want to unblock all my obstacles so that it increases the odds and eliminates the luck of becoming “a figure,” someone beyond my local Dunbar limits, outside my audience, and if I'm being honest, outside the 21st century. I realize this might be a confession of vanity, but I don’t think it’s for the sake of being known or idolized, for I’d do the whole thing anonymously or pseudonymously if that’s what it took. I’m an introvert and very much appreciate my solitude. But to rise above the filter of obscurity from great work is to offer others the experience that triggered me to make stuff in the first place. There's a sense of paying it forward.

Again, I'm not sure here if I'm trying to justify an inner, hidden vanity of mine, or if there really is a paradox worth sitting with. A different and possibly wiser point of view is to be indifferent to outcomes. Mastery is all you need: sometimes it gets recognized and sometimes it doesn't. Figures without mastery are idols, influencers, farces. What matters is the inner quest to transcend your limits.

So back to the original question, what are my limits? I am under-studied compared to Huxley, under-lived to Kerouac, unexplored compared to Pessoa, inarticulate to Woolf, unwise to Christ. And so half the battle is in trying to sustain conversations with these people, through their work, for a full decade, until you absorb their particularities into your own essence; but also book knowledge is useless unless you live and integrate it; that involves courage, which is not something you absorb in prose.

That is the bottleneck to everything, to life and art: courage. We each have to overcome our sheepishness and strive to live in Third ways. And while I have extreme courage in some areas, I am a coward in many others (I will spare you the accounting). How do you wring that out of your nerves? It is the limiting constraint in everything. It is the weakest link. In each sport I played as a kid, I had one trait of excellence that was rendered useless by a handicap: the hardest shot in soccer but I could not dribble; the best rebounder who could not lay up; the golden glove with a wimp’s arm; lightning legs but Super Mario sprinting form. Likewise, I can’t write or live without courage.

And so really I’m six years into writing, the same length of time I spent in architecture school, but as if I built my own curriculum. I am only at square one with everything ahead of me.

Here's a list of what I'm reading through May. The strategy is to gather a bunch of well-written anthologies and textbooks across different fields, read them on Kindle, highlight a lot, and then get into conversations with them (that part of the process is TBD):

• Alan Ryan, On Politics: introduction + chapters on Hobbes/Locke
• Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: Introduction + chapter on Montaigne
• Plutarch's Lives: introduction + chapters on Thesseus/Romulus and their comparison
• Russel Brand, A History of Western Philosophy: Introduction, Pythagoras, Liberalism, Locke, Hegel
• How to Read a Book: Part One (Ch 1-5)
• Collins Dictionary: The letter A (TBD, I only have this physical, but want to get back into language)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essais Vol 1-3: Starting with the abridged translation by Screech and then backfilling)
• Alexis de Tocqueville: introduction + Vol 2.1 Ch 1-3, 17; Vol 2.4 Ch 1-4,8,13,20; Vol 2.4 Ch 6-8

I want to be in conversation with my books. This was Montaigne’s whole thing. He did this for 10 years. I can’t help but think that Kindle/eBooks/digital reading is a better format for this. If I were only reading, ie: if I were retreating into a tower to retire and die, then I’d see the appeal of doing it all by hand. [B] I'd wire index cards with string! [A] But this is maybe a 3rd or 5th or realistically 10th priority. I’m called to it, but given the range of things I’m juggling, efficiency actually does matter here. I know efficiency does bring invisible amputations, but also, if I’m not efficient here, I might just not do it in the first place. Since all my highlights sync to Obsidian, I can build a writing app that loads in highlights and then let’s me write directly to them.

I suppose the counter-argument is that I am juggling too many things. If I were really to choose, to pick the project I’d have to do, it would probably be to focus on building my business to support my family, but that also cuts me off from soul and spontaneity, and so this whole reading/writing for leisure thing is a healthy counter-balance; [B] budding aspirations warrant a minimal efficiency to bloom.

I set up a chronofile, inspired by Buckminster Fuller's system, where he logged every 15 minutes for like 70 years. That's intense! I'm going to run an experiment. In the past I've operated under the premise of "capture as little as possible," as in, capture just what's worth it, because then you'll have a mess of notes to go through. But agents change this; all the yak shaving (tedious, endless work) is handled. This could lead to hyperlogging, 100-400 logs per day. I've done this before as a kind of Hermetic T1 ritual (from Franz Bardon), and it's an intense way to see everything crossing your mind. This scale of writing might be the best way to "meta-program" your psyche. Essays do this in a way, but an essay let's you go very deep on a particular idea (and you might be deluding yourself, or you might be articulating a take in an ideology that you'll outgrow in 5 years).

Every generation needs to find its invisible canon to solve its crises:

The last 2 years have been a deep dive into essay composition, but I want to think harder about taste. Of course, I believe fundamentals come first. If you don’t have fluency to express thoughts, then it doesn’t matter what your taste it. Taste without articulation is something like a status trap. People take pride in sitting at the intersection of three particular aesthetics, and using it as a razor to justify their artistic decisions, an excuse to avoid the militaristic discipline required to learn the fundies.

I’m sure there are proper terms for this, but I’m going to riff on taste and derive it all from scratch. Could be fun to read back on this in 10 years.

Yes, anyone can have a taste developed through circumstance, but that’s “narrow taste.” Algorithms make it easier to fall into taste traps. You see the same thing over and over; you are a Substack psychographic; confident in your uniqueness, but you’ve been force fed the same slop as 1.2 million other people.

And then there’s “wide taste,” which is a lifelong practice of reading from odd, competing, singular, idiosyncratic silos. Only by being well-read can you actually build proper maps of a culture. There really isn’t a shortcut to cultivate taste, it takes tremendous time and effort; without it you’ll only be able to cling to feeble, flimsy opinions.

But it’s not enough to read widely; there’s “discerning taste,” the ability to selectively pluck out a small percent of the things you’ve read and deem them as special. 

Ultimately there are questions on what to read, and well-read people tend to point to old books, the canon, but that feels like outsourcing your discernment. What good is the canon? Sure, if it's survived for centuries, there's probably something to it, but it risks turning you into a homogenized intellectual if that's your only source (and yet also, it helps to know the classics so you can speak that language, but it's probably best to supplement with 50% nn-canonical sources).

The question behind the question is this: what is the point of a serious reading habit? I’d argue that you read to understand the range of ways that words can move you, and to accumulate ideas and lenses that help you navigate the circumstance of your life and generation. The western canon might have some overlap, but not all Great Books are the books you need. The western canon is helpful as a history of literature, a record of how the species bursted through with original linguistic concepts and forms. That matters! That’s worth studying if you want to understand your heritage, your species, the norms of older times, and the outer limits of language.

But from a perspective of “renaissance” or “revival,” to surface old ideas to help our current situation, that’s a very different canon. So the word “canon” is flexible. You hear people making “personal canons” all the time now, which are effectively, just the books you like. There are also "tech canons" and even the "China tech canon." But you could argue that as society mutates, each generation has their own invisible canon, some combination of obscure books, that if discovered could help them navigate the narrow passage oftheir time.

Can AI have taste in this kind of canon creation? Maybe a culture progressively rots if each generation is unable to find the scattered canon that’s destined to them, and maybe AI can help reverse our fumblings. The question then is, what do humans lose? What matters in the act of canon creation? The orientation (the thesis on what’s worth finding), the mapping (selecting the books), the reading (digesting old books), or the synthesis (making new things from old readings)?

I asked as AI about what we lose, and here's what it said, which I don't buy:

But Taste—true, earned taste—is a byproduct of the inefficiency of finding those things yourself. When you hunt for the “Generational Canon” manually, you have to wade through trash. You have to read ten books that don’t resonate to find the one that vibrates in your hand. That wasted time isn’t waste; it’s calibration. It provides the contrast necessary for “discerning taste.” If an AI hands you a perfect platter of 10/10 bangers that align perfectly with your soul, you lose the ability to detect why they are good. You become a connoisseur who has never tasted a bad wine, which is to say, you aren’t a connoisseur at all; you’re just a consumer of high-quality inputs.

I think there is enough discernment and active reading within a book that helps with calibration. ie: I'd rather read through the right recommended book 5 teams, then wastefully read 4 books that were trash, so that I can find the right book and read it once. My gut says that the beginning and end of the workflows are most important: orientation and synthesis. The mapping work is for specialized canon makers, which could be humans or agents. Even when AI provides you a map, there's still research to do on each book, and discernment on where to plunge.

The reading part is more nuanced. Of course, when you don't read, you can't synthesize. But maybe AI can assist us finding the right things in a given book. As in, maybe Infinite Jest is just so thick that I'm going to procrastinate on starting for a decade. But maybe there's a 50-page excerpt in the middle that is hyper-relevant to the month I'm open to having AI summarize the beginning and end, so that I can dive in and experience the right passage at the right time. This doesn't replace reading the full thing, and maybe that will happen in a future stage of my life. This feels like a middle ground—I'm not saying I want to extract summaries and factoids for other purposes; I do want to immerse in the text for 10-20 hours, I just don't have 100-200 hours in that given month, and so in this case AI is doing what a college professor does: curate.

I have become much better at determining if I should buy a book or not, I think. Yes, a bookstore is a portal of portals, but realistically, some books have enough friction to prevent you from going through them. I found some books on Ernst/alchemy that felt aligned with what I want to learn, but after reading 2 pages, I can tell that there’s little attention to prose; it’s thick and long and I don’t have months of open time. Either make it a short essay to convey the idea, or give me a long book with careful prose. A long technical book only appeals to a specialist, and right now I’m a generalist.

There is an intimidation in knowing you’ll never read all that you want to read and never write all that you want to write. There are nearby dimensions you could know but won’t. "βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή," or "Ars longa," vita brevis," or "Life is short, the art is long." That aphorism was originally by Hippocrates about the practice of medicine, but Chaucer extended it in 1380: "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." Those phrases acknowledge the fact, but not the dread or urgency behind it.

Just as jogging became popular when physical labor was automated by machines, I wonder if essay writing will become popular when intellectual labor becomes automated by machines. I think it’s a stretch though. The body erodes in a way that is visible and alarming, and so we quickly realize the need to stay moving. I don’t known if cognitive diminishment is as easy to notice.

How can kids build progressive agency with media? A book library is a good model for other forms of media to follow: they scan a collection, decide to take a single thing out from it, interact with it, return it, and consciously grow or shrink their collection. It's an act of shaping a thing that shapes you. It involves spatial memory. Consider how different this is from a kid in front of a screen with an endless feed of algorithmic cartoons shaping them. The whole wonder of a medium gets flattened. Streaming is our default, but is it worth building an analog media library of VHS/CD/DVD for kids?

In the decade before pot was legalized in New York, if you wanted edibles, it came in the form of a homemade brownie, and it’s unbelievable to think the dosages of those might have been 100-300 mg per brownie. For context, the legal limit now is 5-10 mg per gummy. Here’s what GPT has to say on the level required for edibles to turn psychedelic:

“Edibles become distinctly psychedelic—with altered time perception, visual distortions, auditory hallucinations, ego dissolution, and intense introspection—typically around 50–100mg of THC, especially for those with low tolerance. For some sensitive users, 30–50mg can already induce quasi-psychedelic effects. Beyond 150–200mg, even experienced users can experience full-on tripping: melting visuals, looping thoughts, loss of body awareness, and encounters with archetypal or “divine” mental imagery.

There was zero issue in bringing edibles into the Sphere, and maybe that’s obvious, but I can only compare it to the paranoia of trying to bring brownies into MSG a decade ago (which really was more like eating the whole thing outside—50-100 mg?—before, for fear of getting caught, and then peaking right when the opener is done, to a 45 minutes experience of the chatter of 19,500 people turning into a terrifying white noise). Now it’s legal and destigmatized, and you can take small doses every 45 minutes to space out and control the high. They should probably have an edible stand directly inside the venue. Why not? Is an alcohol overdose not way more troublesome and messy than a weed overdose? Even though it’s all legal now, it will probably take another generation for it to be as casual as alcohol or coffee. Each has their function. Marijuana brings heightened introspection and perception, which is an obvious choice for any concert or aesthetic experience.

1. Did Jerry Garcia ever comment on the future of robots?” I asked this question to the robot in the Sphere lobby, and it gave me a BS response (effectively, “No, Jerry Garcia, the guitarist of the Grateful Dead, never talked about robots, but people do!”). I really wanted it to infer what Jerry might think about robot chaperons in the lobby of his venues, but I had to ask the human host to ask the robot question, so I couldn’t get too specific.
2. Most people seemed intrigued and revulsed by the micro-expressions in its face, except the guy behind us. He told us that several people have complained to the Sphere management that it makes them uncomfortable. He thinks humanoid robots will be commercially available in 3-4 years. He wants one in his kitchen.
3. Andrew said someone told him that the hardest thing for robots to recreate will be a sense of smell, and so in the future, if androids look identical to humans, they’ll use smell tests as proof of humanity.
4. The outer lobby of the sphere has black reflective floors, glowing hues on the parapets, and tangling installments that if you stare into, will trip you out.
5. The Sphere markets itself as a haven for “22nd century technology,” but the travelators are broken.

I really disliked S7 E1 of Black Mirror, not because it was depressing, but because it’s terrible science fiction. I never expected BM to be hard sci-fi (where it gets into all the technical and nerdy specifics)—that would alienate its Netflix audience. But at the very least, it should be believable.

There’s probably a middle ground where SOMEONE on the team thinks through the realistic development of technology, so that the writers have some constraints around character and plot development. But this whole episode was simplified to the point of being cheeky.

Of course, companies will use deceptive tactics to push you to upgrade. But it's ridiculous watching Rashida Jones' mind get paused to spew ads without her realizing. Really? They mapped Verizon salesperson antics onto something as invasive as a BCI, which would never be so explicit.

There's a viral video of a teacher using AI in a Chinese classroom to help kids visualize their future self in their dream profession. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” One says “Astronaut,” and then behind them it shows them, all grown up, on the moon. I wonder what that does? Maybe it helps some kids stay motivated and achieve their goal? Or maybe it gets kids to cling. My dreams as a kid were very stupid. I wanted to be a professional baseball player. I also liked beavers. If I saw my immature vision in high-fidelity, might I have never grown up?

I originally found Substack compelling as digital land that you own that's connected to a system of roads to help people discover you. It doubled as a personal website and a social media network. Two years ago, I thought it was doing a fine job. A small feature that I really commended was the ability to toggle on/off the pop-up module for people who weren’t subscribed. This boost subscriptions, but if you find the UX annoying and tasteless, you can disable it.

I thought the whole site would evolve with that ethos, but it seems like things are being forced now. It’s as if someone is building a massive billboard on the road in front of your house. A lot of people are resistant to all the video features, and now especially Reels. Their justification is that “it drives creator subscriptions” (their business model).

Why can’t I toggle Reels on/off? It is so centrally located, and I purposely deleted all the other apps on my phone that have vertical video reels because I think they’re toxic. I’d pay Substack $10 to remove this from navigation (X lets me do this if I pay). But the reason we can’t turn it off is because they know it’s addicting, and they’re hoping it can scale the number of paid subscriptions, thus scaling their revenue. I get how this is more aligned than the advertising model, but if this platform is really about creator independence, we need more customization in how we create and consume.

Just make sure you export your subscriber list every month.

Toying with this idea of "the geometry of the meaning crisis." Maybe this abstract society-scale idea will make more sense through (8) visuals and patterns. Before I unpack each, here’s a sentence on what’s going on and how to fix it: Society used to provide rigid/objective packages of meaning; we found value in shedding them, but now we’re in a world where meaning is completely subjective, and we’re lost; so instead we need to understand the structures we dissolved, synthesize opposites, and not discard them, but transcend them. (What triggered this)

OLD WORLD OBJECTIVITY WAS BAD:

• Oppressive kings
• Male dominance & slavery
• No individuality at all
• Sexual repression
• No ability to build wealth
• Single world view
• Crammed in cities
• No autonomy of thought

BUT SUBJECTIVITY LED TO EXCESS & SCRAMBLING:

• Hierarchy flattening (decline in excellence)
• Duality dissolution (gender dysphoria)
• Downsampling (identity politics, psychographics)
• Hyper-salience (sexualization of everything)
• Hyper-commodification (influencer culture)
• Rationalization (death of religion)
• Disaggregation (isolation in the suburbs)
• Complete relativity of thought (conspiracy theories)

AND SO TO SOLVE THE MEANING CRISIS, WE NEED TO NOT ABANDON FORM, BUT TO RECONFIGURE AND TRANSCEND IT:

• Create your own journey in context of death
• Honor opposites & resolve paradoxes
• Defy labels & become 1 of 1
• Build attentional discipline & immunity to triggers
• Act with agency, honest income
• Pursue mystical experiences & altered states of consciousness
• Take responsibility to forge community
• Intentional evolution of your consciousness every week

A misconception in altered states is to assume the new state is right and the old is wrong. Yes, perhaps your old thinking was illusory, but that doesn’t mean wherever you end up post-trip is true. It’s poor thinking. Just because you zoom in, zoom out, see interconnectedness, etc., doesn’t mean it’s true.

In the other direction, it's a trope for someone stoned to think something mediocre is amazing; this might lead them to believe that no serious insights can emerge from an altered state, which is equally far from the truth!

Our mind is designed to shift in and out scales; we can’t cling to our first break out; nor can we deny all breakouts because the first one was wrong. We need to oscillate back and forth, to see each insight fresh—with possibility and skepticism—to understand the true nature of something.

David and I got into this talk on how technology will bring us to a point of serious disorientation, and how a Christian (or religious/moral) framework can help ground all the turbulence. At some point I made the point that I think it’s important to die. I believe that some kind of soul-flight is the main climax of consciousness. I don’t believe in the Christian eternal afterlife, but in a 3-minute moment of time dilation that is, in essence, an eternity—1,000 lifetimes. As so while I never want to be literally immortal, I want literary immorality. All the text of my life establishes a moral foundation for a text-based replica to outlive me and interact with and hopefully guide future generations, whether it’s 10 or 10 million people. Books already fill this function, except now books are agentic and interactive.

After spending a week or two watching a decaying human body, it’s weird to investigate the life of your own hands. Death is the norm, and so you take for granted the miraculous and automatic coordination it takes to make a fist. A death is not just the end of a 78 year life, but a 60 million year chain of evolution. To go back into the ground is to return not to the origin, not to the womb, but to a place your genes have never been, the place where another 10 million year cycle begins. I get the reason for pine caskets.

Most people probably don't put much thought into their own funeral, because why plan an event you won’t experience? This might be a writerly perspective, but a funeral might be the moment in your life where everyone in your life is most curious about what your consciousness was like.

From now, I want to start writing, 1) letters to specific people, 2) my values/virtues, and 3) essays on the nature of dying, death, the afterlife, and legacy.

I also want to design a kill switch. Perhaps my wife or future kids will have access to a page to declare “Mike’s dead” and if I don’t answer within 24 hours, then I’m confirmed dead and a series of processes are automatically triggered (ie: emails, letters posts, music, videos, an invitation, etc.).

It will update a /death slug on my personal website (which will hopefully have 300 year hosting), and my gravestone will have a QR code that points to it.

There's a foolishness in embracing slop-poetry over real poetry. Yeah, you can ask 100 casual Americans who haven’t put any time into reading or understanding poetry, and they’ll all prefer LLM outputs because they have a tendency for explicit clarity, but maybe it’s worth having some opaque mediums. When it comes to essays, I think accessibility is important. But poetry is supposed to be cryptic and mysterious. It’s a feature that it haunts you and reveals itself to you over decades. For every thousand who balk at it, it finds one person to completely infiltrate. I’d be curious to see this same study among poetry readers.

2025 might be the best time to be a writer. We’re at the edge of a new time, a writer’s apocalypse, a golden age of the essay, or who knows. It’s a collective paranoia, a mass uncertainty, and it’s that kind of restlessness that requires writers to make sense of.

Talks about BCIs (brain computer interfaces) naturally skeeve us out because we imagine a doctor drilling a hole in our skull and inserting a silicon chip. What if it weren’t silicon?

I was reading about how AGI would design new kinds of hardware to evolve itself into ASI, and not only does it find the limits of silicon (via. cubic liquid-cooled chips), but it pioneers other forms of computing. Not just quantum computing, but photon-based motherboards and “neuro-morphic chips” (wetware). I need to wrap my head around this more, but imagine biological neurons that are able to store, send, and receive information, reliably and efficiently.

In the future, you might be able to have a BCI without having any metal in your head. It could be something like a small piece of tissue (which interfaces with your own brain matter), and maybe it includes a single qubit chip, which serves as a “quantum wifi” connection to a remote super-intelligence, giving you instant access to alien processing.

I have no expertise here, so this is basically all a hallucination, but I just imagine that maybe BCIs won’t involve that much-feared surgery. Maybe you take a pill that enables a neuro-morphic chip to situate itself in your brain, and the only side effect is you piss silver once (with no side effects).

The point of this thought experiment is to remove the installation process from your calculation on if you’d get a BCI. It changes the question: Would you use technology to permanently alter your consciousness in an extreme way? Would you install an on/off switch that gives you on-demand access to the infinity-brain effect of an LSD trip?

Imagine an essay collection that masterfully rendered 2023 in peak essay form? Compositionally, it fuses memoir and journalist and creative writing, but each essay is anchored in something that is anchored to the year. It has timely topics that tap into timeless themes.

So it might include: our first year with ChatGPT, the 10/7 Gaza attacks on Israel, the Burning Man weather disaster, Barbenheimer, the death of Henry Kissinger, the Brittney Spears / Pope memoirs, the evolution from Twitter to X, the Rome memes, the Titan submersible explosion, the Hollywood writer’s strike, the Hawaiian fires, the collapse of Silicon Valley banks, the Florida book bans, etc.

These are not articles. They have a human at the center, and the current event becomes a microcosm to understand something perennial. It is not reportage, but flash memoirs from the cultural frontline.

A "stabilizing fiction" is when the controller tells a lie to controlled to maintain order and spirit. Think about XMAS as a stabilizing fiction between parents and kids. Think about democracy as a stabilizing fiction between rulers and the ruled.

As I'm working on some Essay Architecture wiki pages, I’ve caught myself saying ‘this causes reader’s trance’ in a few different spots. I used to think it needed to have a single source, but now my latest thinking is it’s a combination of these three:

• Tension (story/subtext): which is about having something slightly in the future that drives you forward. This is like a personal sense of stakes/curiosity where you’re invested in what happens. (ethos)

• Flow: which is about the actual smoothness of your syntax. It’s the ability to a complex soup of ideas and create a tight linear rail where the reader can process a lot without friction. (Even if you build tension, the trance is broken if it’s hard to wade through paragraphs. (logos).

• Sight/Sound: When your prose is laced with imagery & sonic devices (rhythm, rhyme, repetition), it hits us in our two primary senses. I feel like part of reader’s trance is when you can actually see/hear/feel it (it’s more like a hallucination than something abstract).

So together: tension moves you forward, flow keeps you moving, and sight/sound activates the imagination as you’re in motion. (And side note: I think paragraph transitions are the most likely places where reader’s trance gets broken; it’s like dropping the baton in a relay race).

(Note for an essay contest with LWS:)

Whatever genre you write in, if it’s made of prose, it’s made of paragraphs. E.B. White said the paragraph is “the unit of composition.” The idea that each paragraph contains a unique thought is an ancient one. Before there were spaces on the page (between paragraphs, and even between words), there were symbols in the margins to let the reader know when the writer was shifting to a new idea.

I like the idea of scoping this week’s contest to a paragraph for two reasons. 1) It’s a small scope, and I hope it might trigger a daily practice where you record your ideas and thoughts as paragraphs (I recommend writing a few and submitting your favorite), and 2) It will get you to think more analytically about the atomic unit that makes up all of your writing.

My project, Essay Architecture, has caused me to think extensively about what a paragraph is. Of course, there are galaxies of possible paragraphs. Each one should be different. The commonalities between them are almost too obvious: a paragraph has a beginning, and end, and a path to get there. This sounds obvious, but

• Frame: How can the opening sentence serve as a hook? The opening of a paragraph is more than a factual summary of the information contained in it; it is often a concise statement with an embedded mystery. Orient us, while leaving something unresolved.
• Fabric: How can you build a compelling chain of sentences? If your paragraph is a single idea or scene, you can “rotate” around it to show different facets of it. As you move through ideas, consider how synonyms, transition words, and sentence forms can be used to create forward momentum.
• Finale: How can the closing sentence have power in the subtext? Some writers end paragraphs on a punchline, and others end with an emotional punch. Some paragraphs can close on an epic, long sentence, and others on a short quip, but in either case, there can be an implication that rings bigger than the words in the sentence. When you close by showing rather then telling, it gives the reader something to see, feel, and reflect on in the space between paragraphs.

The creative process is filled with wormholes. Imagine thought happening along an XY plane; eventually, the inquisitive mind is blocked. It looks for a new insight to transcend into the Z axis, spiraling to find some new plane to occupy.

Just saw The Substance, and my general reaction after was “I can’t believe somebody did that” (particularly, the ending). That’s what movies should evoke. Almost any exclusive series served on a streaming service is designed to appeal to the mean. There is no demographic for mutated and grotesque Demi Moore.

HOW OLD ARE YOU? WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PART OF BEING HERE? WIFE? TELL ME ABOUT YOUR FAMILY? WHEN DID YOU COME TO AMERICA? DO YOU LIKE PLANTING TREES? DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TREE YOU PLANTED? WHAT’S IT LIKE TO LIVE HERE ON THE FARM?

The risk of socialism is no incentives; the risk of capitalism is bad incentives.

I was standing up on the airplane, waiting in line for the toilet, and the announcement was so fuzzy and illegible that the woman next to me asked, “are we doing an emergency landing because someone’s giving birth on the plane?” A flight attendant confirmed the situation: the Wi-Fi was down.

History is a crude engine of progress.

• Nov 15, 9:19 AM—A blistering toe, three suitcases with their guts spilled out, and a hotel room with an Oscar Wilde aesthetic: royal blue door trims, floral print, a British landscape, and of course his portrait.
• Nov 17, 1:34 PM—The first bell I heard at the one-hour mark was a dud, but 1:34 PM was a holy minute. I found myself at the right corner, at the time the sun carved a hole and illuminated the gold trim of the clock tower. There was a bagpipe player, who I could hear but not see, droning a deep note and riffing in some mysterious Celtic scale I couldn’t quite identify. It was crowded, but even a passing ambulance couldn’t and didn’t break the trance.
• Nov 17th, 11:31 AM—Our tour guide could easily make it on Twitter. “Those lions aren’t lions,” and “You’ve been lied to, that Buckingham Palace is not Buckingham Palace, I’ll explain why” (and then walks away, towards it—what we know it as is actually the 3rd extension, and no one lives there). “Here’s Big Ben, but that’s not its name.” Also, “we’re going to meet some spies, I’ve arranged it.” Hook after hook.
• Nov 18th, 7:07 PM—The holy grail of prose is the transfiguration of narration and analysis. It's not in the description of the foggy window, nor in the details of London's climate in November, but in using one for the means of the other.
• Nov 18th, 7:15 PM—Why does Shoreditch remind me of Manhasset? The rain blurs everything—the sidewalk has yellow jagged reflections of neon advertisements —and in passing I hear “it’s pissin’ out.”
• Nov 19th, 3:20 PM—Eleven strangers in an elevator. You know not the language they speak, or the clarity of their mind, or their proximity from death in recent months—but we all know how to occupy the silence of a 30-second ride down to slab where we will immediately disperse and forget each other.
• Nov 21st, 2:21 PM—Cognitive liberty is the ultimate right, and it’s one you have to claim for yourself.

Writing isn't just thinking. Writing invokes conceptual intelligence, compositional intelligence, and linguistic intelligence. Also, of course, emotional intelligence and self awareness. And recursive intelligence. And a bullshit detector.

How might you write in a style that might betray everyone’s impression of you? What could you write that might get you fired or cancelled? To be mythological, what would get you crucifies? Obviously, these questions are extreme, but they nudge scared writers in the right direction, out of their shell of extreme self-consciousness.

Texts to a friend on how to solve the political information crisis:

• I think there could be value in using AI to create: “the Internet's best comment section.”
• So often, whether its Reddit or ZeroHedge or Twitter, I skip the content and just look at reactions, but the biggest friction is redundancy—if you click into a Twitter trending tag; you’ll see 50 posts in a row that all parrot the same headline, but with different wordings. You need to schlep through slop to find a signal. You also get echo chambers, and bot storms.
• So consider the story of “NYC protests about immigration or deportation”—one thing happens, and there’s a shockwave through old and new media. Imagine processing every article and every comment for that event… I really just want to see a headline of what happens, and then 10 radically different comments to expand my range of interpretation.
• I don’t think it needs to be “left/right/center” it should look for distinct takes—it means every chosen comment is a unique or novel way to process the given facts. It's not "bias-free." I don't want to eliminate bias, I want to categorize and consider all possible bias.

Prompt: “You are an expert at synthesizing complex comment sections for political news articles. You will read the hundreds of comments below, and then create a list of the distinct interpretations of the event. There is no given number of points you should end up with, but no two points should be remotely similar. It's your job to cluster. To structure your points, please start with a concise, punchy, witty one sentence summary, and then use 2-3 sentences to unpack, and quote directly so we get a sense of the source. The quote or comments can vary in length (from 20-100 words each). Comments below:

It feels symbolic that Sam Altman is having his first around the same time an AGI is being born. There is definitely a fiction idea in an AI engineer translating insights from his developing child onto the AI he's building.

Imagine an app that lets fans of a baseball stadium coordinate to create highly specific cheers and taunts that could throw off the away team. What if it worked? Would it be banned?

Why was agenda 47 pushed on X? It seems like old videos (1-2 years old) are being presented as breaking. Hundreds of people are restacking. I saw one community note indicating that this was old (and it then appeared to disappear).

Some points on what it includes:

1. Ability to remove rogue bureaucracy
2. Clean out corrupt actors in national security & intelligence
3. Reform FISA courts
4. Expose the hoaxes and abuses of power
5. Stop collusion between government and media
6. Independent Inspector General
7. Independent auditing of intelligence, no spying on citizens or disinformation against American people
8. Move bureaucracies out of Washington
9. Ban bureaucrats from taking jobs from companies they regulate
10. Push a constitutional amendment to oppose term limits on members of Congress

What do I want for the next generation? Value family. Cultivate your virtues. Take risks. Find your own religion. Make things. Be involved with civics. Be open minded.

There's a cartoon argument that a network news station is controlled by donors and spews propaganda to brainwash the public; alternatively, the information you found online is free, bottom-up, more democratic, slant-free—"free media." I think the opposite might be true. Social media is more dangerous and dehumanizing than mainstream media. It's easier to believe that the source is free of gatekeepers, because the source looks like you, not an professional news anchor.

People often reduce democratic media down to a single criteria—free speech—but it requires more than that. It's not just limiting censorship, but eliminating self-censorship. It's about enabling the citizen, the fundamental unit of the country. Can they speak? Can they control what they see? Are they pressured to towards saying certain things?

Some principles:

• Participation: does everyone post, or is it still a reality show?
• Explicitness of Feed: do you have control/legibility over what you’re being fed?
• Commodity-proof: are you incentivized to converge into a 1D brand?

The post-election Twitter memes are predicting a “New American Golden Age.” These videos are a rejection of woke DEI liberals, and they’ve over-corrected to become indulgent in materialism, violence, and sex. These videos show yoga pants, hot girls, tongues, weapons, cars, Greek villas, 9/11, tennis sluts, Rome, tanks, Sears, motorcycles, NYC, and dogs. It’s a sad breed of Americana that seems edited by a 16 year old. Comments include, “I felt my testosterone go up 20 pts,” “All I want is a blonde trad wife for christmas,” and “White Boy century.”

As someone who doesn’t identify with either party and has voted for both, I’ll have to reflect more on this [an essay of a friend].

There are definitely some exceptions that break a simple dichotomy. For example, a republic of different states can promote more diversity compared to a single globalized entity (it's ironic that Republicans are culturally against diversity, but structurally for it). And if you actually look at what a republic is, I’d say that offloading responsibility via election goes against the republican idea of autonomy.

There’s another interesting thread here on the nature of selfishness. Either end of the spectrum is wicked: I think it devolves into “altruistic” mobs or hubristic self-destruction. Maybe solving this paradox is key: selfish interests that benefit the larger organism.

The norm is for power struggles to happen in private. While each party is positioning itself to the working class, this really might just be a coup–some private elite overthrowing the established public elites. Some scenarios:

1. It's thwarted;
2. They integrate;
3. A struggle—they both die;
4. Coup (no change);
5. Coup (far worse);
6. Coup (better off);
7. Coup (the battle kills both, makes room for new);
8. Power vacuum (the emergent order is worse);
9. New party (exposes both, well-oriented, popular but limited power);
10. Constitutional reboot (system-level change).

When restructuring a draft I often pepper numbers, out of order, throughout the piece. It might seem random at first, but if you read through it chronologically, it points to a potential new structure of the essay. Each number represents a distinct idea that could be its own paragraph.

The numbers flow in order (1A>1E, 2, etc.); when you see letters mixed in, it means that multiple scattered parts could actually be unified into the same paragraph. And if two areas have the same mark (4B), it means they cover the same idea, and can be compressed or consolidated.

This system allows us to talk with more precision around structure and sequence (especially within a linear document editor). It's an alternate path through the same material.

In 2016, Trump brought the word “deep state” to public consciousness. Conspiracy theorists used to be an Internet fringe group. Now it’s partisan. The killing of Epstein in 2019 brought a new level of lucidity; that half of the insane things Alex Jones rants about might be true. Now in 2024, the assassination attempt of Trump is drawing parallels to the JFK assassination. I think Trump’s will to power came from exposing the corruption of rival power—that doesn't mean he’s not equally implicated. Is there any precedent of this?