marriage is two people in love standing in the same bathroom

Why we should all spend more time in search boxes and less time in news feeds.

when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head.

January was the month with a thousand days that would not die, but now it’s February and these tweets by my friend Mark Larson popped up in my head: What good is February? I used to think. February is a good month to die. February is a month for florists, with its Valentine’s Day bouquets and

Every single time some stranger online says something dumb or rude or completely beside the point to me, I think of Paul Ford’s “Why wasn’t I consulted?”: “Why wasn't I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have

I think one reason I’m drawn to writing and art is that I don’t have to be competitive — if I’m competing with anyone, it’s against myself, or a bunch of my favorite (most of them dead) artists, or it’s a kind of friendly competition spurred on by seeing other folks’ work in the world. And even then, I’m not competing to be the best at what I do, I’m trying to be the only one who does what I do.

Jeff Tweedy mentioned this Dolly Parton philosophy in his memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Come Back): Dolly Parton once said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people

This schedule went viral on Twitter with the caption: “Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing routine is the ideal writing routine.” It’s a lovely, lovely thing, but it should be pointed out that it was an “ideal” routine for her, too, as she says in the 1988 interview it’s excerpted from. (Left out: “I go to

Mary Oliver has died. I have a friend who used to keep her poem “Wild Geese” folded up in his wallet. It begins: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. —George Steiner Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated

“I have always felt like this blog is my refrigerator. I make something, or I clip out something I like, and I put it on the refrigerator. The next day, I go and find something else to put on the fridge.”

“But, for writers, maybe it’s not just returning to the things we love… maybe it’s embedding the things we love in new things that we write that keeps those fish alive.”

“We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong. Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder.” “But the switch towards taking on a practice and discipline is admitting to yourself that you suck and you want to get better.”

Whenever someone says, “You should do a parenting book!” I think of this tweet.

I’m proofing the third pass of Keep Going. I find it really difficult at this stage of a project to get the right perspective — “fresh eyes” — for the thing, which makes it really, really hard to make edits. The production schedule for this book has been much more accelerated than any of my

“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.” —David McCullough In his Paris Review interview, David McCullough talks about how important seeing is to the writer and historian, and

“That’s how he got started. So: model, see if there’s interest, and then offer up the time, space, and materials.”

I came in from my 10-foot commute once and my 3-year-old looked up from his snack and said, “What did you make today, papa?” It took me by surprise, as I had always assumed that when I was out of sight I was out of mind. (I now know that children seem to be most interested in you

“I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime. Thinking too much at the end of the day is a recipe for despair. Everything looks better in the light of the morning. Cliché, maybe, but it works.”

“I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones”

“What I love about my son’s drawings is that he does not really care about them once he’s finished them. To him, they are dead artifacts, a scrap of by-product from his learning process. (For me, they’re tiny masterpieces to hang on the fridge.)”

This week vlogger Leena Norms included Steal Like An Artist on her list of “Top 10 Self Help Books that ACTUALLY HELP.” I was especially taken with her thoughtful intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdyYF2vH8pA Steal Like An Artist was written and drawn at such a fast and furious pace that I don’t think I spent a lot of time thinking about

We have talked the 5-year-old into keeping a casual diary of sorts, and, while it’s so fun to see his days summarized in his little hyphenated paragraphs, it’s also really surprising, too. For instance, we’d thought that he had a terrible time on the day mentioned above! He moped around and complained about the heat

Any company that cares about their employees’ bodies enough to have a chef and a gym, should also offer something for the mind. Imagine how it changes the recruiting conversation to say “we have an onsite independent bookstore” as one of the amenities.