Substrate

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Last night I was picking through my stack and started composer Philip Glass’s memoir, Words Without Music. I wound up reading over 50 pages before I passed out. (That’s a lot: I’m a slow reader, especially at

“In this future, certain objects, like the snow shovel, might be represented by their own canonical version—the only one Amazon actually ever shows you. Everyone will see their own best choice, though, so it will be canonical just to you.”

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

“Graffiti artists are hired by real estate firms to bring a safe level of grittiness to a neighborhood. Ebay asks us to choose between passing on a valuable collectable to a relative or finding the highest bidder.” “But since something truly new or different is unassimilable to capitalism’s techniques for value extraction — economies of scale, interchangeable workers, mass production — much of creativity under capitalism is, as Mould argues, “newness to maintain more of the same,” rather than the development of new ways of being.”

You’ve landed here in search of Paul Jarvis—author of Company of One and podcast host for Call Paul

tired residue

“But in autumn, the evening of the year, a gradual hush falls over nature, its human parts included.”

Take a look behind the scenes at the illustration process for Jason Fried and DHH’s new book, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work”. Back story Every essay in Jason and David’s previous titles, REW…

“This reminds me that I have a half-written blog post about being mid-career in tech that has no conclusion because, well, as you can see, it's unclear to me how to best use this time”

“I’m expecting a few days where I have to keep my eyes closed. I’d love your suggestions for audio escapism — podcasts, audiobooks, games, and other non-visual projects that don’t require intense concentration and are easy to lose yourself in.”

“It’s that work should be a means to an end. And in the end, we should go home.”

The key to the watchOS user interface needs isnu2019t getting the attention it deserves from Apple.

“Twitter can still be great for spreading ideas, but it’s not a particularly good home for them.”

“sometimes the obvious levers for growth later open up the unexpected levers for breakage.”

Everything contains some silence.

“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 there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our ‘hobbies,’ if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.”

All my English teachers talked about the importance of finding “your voice.” It always confused me because I knew we all had so many voices, so many audiences, and my teachers seemed only to really want the kind of voice that sat with its legs crossed, reading the New York Times. I didn’t have to work to find that cross-legged voice—it was the one education necessitated I lead with. What my English teachers didn’t say was that literary voices aren’t discovered fully formed. They aren’t natural or organic. Literary voices are built and shaped—and not just by words, punctuation, and sentences, but by the author’s intended audience and a composition’s form.

My friend Lara Hogan published an email I had sent to her way back (“Advice for a new executive”) and it turned out to be super-helpful to a lot of people based on the engagement with h…

I’ve written about the class I’d like to teach, but what I’ve been thinking about lately is the class I’d like to attend. Not necessarily now, but when I was growing up. In the 6th grade, let’s say…