Substrate

I described it to her: “It’s like the beginning of a weekend day and you feel like you have the whole day in front of you to do whatever you want and all of a sudden it’s six o’clock and you haven’t done anything and you get depressed.” I was still in the morning of that weekend day. So here I am, it’s been about a week and a half.

Discipline is always the denial of something: investing in the long term by forgoing the short term. The question then becomes: who is seeing the returns on that investment? And are those returns desirable in the first place?

Group texts resist this temptation for many reasons. The largest of which is that performance isn’t necessary on the scale of talking with a few friends or family members. Also they’re much more likely to call you on your crap if you do start performing too much.

The future starts from belief, not rationalism, and belief is cultivated partly with aesthetics. Progress will come from regaining a grasp on the aesthetics that move us.

A book is a flexible mirror of the mind. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.

This might be mistaken for sentimentality, but this feeling has little to do with the hallucinogenic loveliness of print. It’s about ownership. It’s about remembering where you were, and perhaps who you were, when you read something.

It feels different now, doesn’t it. It shouldn’t — thousands of people are dying every day. More than 67,000 have died in the U.S. alone, and 245,000 worldwide. But contemporary capitalism has an extraordinary capacity to subsume tragedy: it depends on growth, and on movement, neither of which can happen during the sort of societal paralysis that would be appropriate during this time. Not only, of course, because people are dying — but in order to stem the spread. And so (at least some of us) relax into a sort of short-term amnesia. You want things to be the way things were, you want

Anne Truitt’s advice against immediately judging artists: Don’t have to bring them in for a landing or send them away, just let them circle.

I think flowers enjoy their solitude … I think sprinklers annoy them.

You don’t have to know everything about a topic to write a book on it. You just have to be very interested in something and keep your audience in mind. ​ Technical books don’t have to be written in order. If you have a strong outline, you can hop to some other part of it if you are feeling stuck on the bit you are working on.

What are you seeing from your industry/work that is very clear to you but not obvious to people outside of your world?

I honestly don’t know. All I know is that once an estranged parent dies, there’s often little left but second guesses. My life in many ways has been defined in opposition to my father. It’s a story I’ve heard from others with an estranged parent.

Writing these updates feels like trying to describe a state that's receding from me, like painting a sky full of stars that are already dead. ​ The best online interactions I've had don't try to recreate the past, but start with the premise of disembodiment.

Forecasts rely on knowing when something will occur. Expectations are an acknowledgment of what’s likely to occur without professing insight into when it will happen.

maybe we should allow people to say they’re just not a math person, and maybe we should find ways they can still support and appreciate math without feeling like they need a Ph.D.

The exterior urban environment has unintentionally decoupled from the economy, and to spend time outdoors in these conditions is to re-establish a more direct relationship to space that normally extracts value from us at every turn.

A story about our first year, some fun numbers, and a look to what’s ahead

Because starting means imperfection. It means trying and sometimes (maybe even frequently) failing. It means sometimes re-reading your own words one day, month, year later and thinking “how in the hell did I ever think that was an acceptable sentence” and not taking that as an invitation to stop.

another thing I love about poetry: it’s ability to change meaning

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My unmothered bird, dropped from the sky like a millstone. …the swell of new growth

let the person kiss the mask instead.

A crystal sheet Below, an enormous secret lake, like gladness. and worn by thousands and thousands of other women reminds you of yourself when you are not even sure what that is Mesh of thunder above. Soon I won’t be at arm’s length.