Lots of little gems in John Seabrook’s 1994 New Yorker profile of Bill Gates, but this note stuck with me particularly. The story itself is an interesting case in how you write about something new. The article still stands up, more or less, but so many of the ideas that are revelatory to Seabrook at this specific moment in history—email, the internet, even computers and software—became so normal so soon after. How can you capture […]
Joan Didion, for all her complexities, continues to have… a moment? No, it’s too extended for that. And she was too anxious, too awkward for it. Still, it’s happening: even though she died last year, her words keep coming. Even her stuff keeps coming. I loved this explanation of hers, from a talk (via Lithub) that’s in her book released earlier this year. It’s those obsessions that shape what we are, really. Underneath we’re the […]
Smells are brilliant and infuriating for writers because they are just so hard to express. Here’s an Atlas Obscura piece, an excerpt from Jessica Leigh Hester’s Sewer, describing the waft of fatbergs that clog the pipes beneath London. These moments that overwhelm the senses are fascinating.
Being somebody of strange proportions—tall and wide, but not quite tall enough or wide enough to warrant special treatment—I have never been able to find clothes that feel right. How do people who fit their clothes feel, I wonder. What is it like to just put on a pair of trousers, or a shirt, and be comfortable? So this quote from David Lynch in GQ hit home. My current uniform, established over the course of […]
I loved hearing Annie-B Parson talk about choreography on the Time Sensitive podcast—particularly her work over many years with David Byrne. Parson has worked on a large number of projects in the past two or three decades, culminating in American Utopia (I saw the show when it was on its original tour, totally fascinating.) But the most interesting part was that she now came to see all of those works as, ultimately, the same piece. […]
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