Substrate

—with that eager, amateur’s love. Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. Or it might even be in actual school. In my classes, I ask the students to find a poem they like and to get it by heart. To see someone in their late teens or early twenties, often by gender or ethnicity different from the author, shaping his or her mouth around those sounds created by somebody who is perhaps long dead, or perhaps thousands of miles away, and the students bringing their own experience to it, changing it with their own sensibility, so that they’re both possessed and possessing—those moments have been very moving to me.

Reading the news doesn't make us informed, just the opposite. And our obsession with being informed makes it hard to think long term.

The distaste for telephony is especially acute among Millennials, who have come of age in a world of AIM and texting, then gchat and iMessage, but it’s hardly limited to young people. When  asked , people with a distaste for phone calls argue that they are presumptuous and intrusive, especi

At the service, I read the eulogy below, which tried to explain why he was special to so many of us. Writing it was easy, at least in part because he wrote the best bits himself. The hard part was reading it. He was unabashedly silly. He laughed at his own jokes and at yours. He made it very easy to love him.

One of my favorite joke Twitter accounts is @wacnt. It tweets things Wolfram|Alpha can’t answer. I’ve asked Facebook M to figure out a few of them...

Recently, I replaced the headphones I've had for a long time with some new ones. I've used Beyerdynamic DT 770 for years (now discontinued). On a...

Y’all, I love it when nerds nerd out. If you love something and you share a bit of it with the world, that’s so cool.— Ricky Mondello (@rmondello) February 6, 2019

Depending on who you ask, “remote” working is either gaining steam in the tech industry or still a coveted-but-rare perk for the lucky few. A pattern that seems to be emerging is this: Tech giants …

What emoji do you send when you make a bad pun in a workplace Slack and then want to make a non-apology apology?— Jane Solomon (@janesolomon) February 5, 2019

Weak technologies adapt to the world as it currently exists. Strong technologies adapt the world to themselves. Progress depends on strong technologies.

Yes, the person who is on the slope requires a box or two to stand on, but it is only because they are on lower ground to start — not because they are shorter to begin with. As useful as the picture was in starting conversations around “Equality vs. Equity,” we are basically blaming the person for being short, when in reality, we aren’t standing on a level playing field to start. We aren’t *allowed* to stand on a level playing field.

“I finally wrote a little about Secret Dunny Box: a bathroom installation that lets you listen to a secret message left for you by the previous visitor, but only if you leave a message for the next person. https://t.co/CzXiRYKl5R”

This domain may be for sale!

Of course, there are downsides to each model of relationship. People whose friendships primarily consist of sporadic deep dives probably feel a higher degree of loneliness day-to-day during dry spells in-between the deep dive nourishment. (If you’re in an intimate romantic relationship, this can be okay because you tend to share minutia/quick hits with your spouse so don’t need to lean on friends as much for this.) People whose friendships primarily consist of regular quick check-ins and texts and workday lunches probably feel some lack of depth with some of their so-called “close friends.” They realize that after years of “how was your day?” conversations and staying up to speed on the real time relationship drama or work battles that will someday be easily forgotten — they realize that they’ve never explored life’s deeper questions with their friend.

Many of us think of love and happiness as an object – a thing to obtain. And once we have it, we’re scared to let it go. But there’s a better way to look at it – and even create more of it, without fear of loss.

It took me a long time to see past forever projects. I told myself that making promises gave beginnings gravity. I labeled my newsletter  a “lifelong project” not long after I started it. I called /mentoring a “movement” the day I announced it. Commitment marked a project as something w

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

We expect too much from January and not enough from February.— Mark Larson (@mlarson) February 3, 2012

We stop in front of a vacant store front for a long kiss and so I can wish a positive happy week since we have separate evenings planned.

excited to say i wrote a book about photography and social media! it's out with @VersoBooks in April and you can pre-order it now if you'd like: https://t.co/lD43PwRjJa pic.twitter.com/bmOt0U7R5W— nathanjurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) February 4, 2019

The fact that I have allowed the illusion of the internet’s regard for me to seep so deeply into my unconscious mind makes me nervous. Like any belief system, it only becomes visible when it breaks down.

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