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It’s surprising how many people are resistant to doing things with no agenda. Often, when I ask someone why they’re not doing something they seem good at, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s not going anywhere.” / “I don’t have enough time.” / “I started too late anyway.” They would rather expend their time and energy on the sexier thing, the more obviously lucrative thing. And who could blame them? But that tends to take you along a less interesting route

There’s something powerful about allowing yourself to fully, obsessively love something that makes no sense. And it’s so contrary to how we’re told to live our lives. Identify and capture value! Go into the field where the best jobs are! Marry someone who is reliable! I’m not saying that’s bad advice—it’s good advice from many a perspective—but I also feel like I’ve stumbled into everything meaningful in my life when I was just like, hey, I’ll just give this a shot and it definitely won’t work.

seriously, some of the best cinema is in pornography. If you ignore the money shots, like Bijou by Wakefield Poole, it’s psychedelic gay porn, and it’s just remarkable. It’s interesting because, starting off with the ’90s, there was a pantheon, and there still is a pantheon, so Bergman and Fassbinder, they were at the top of the National Film Theater, as it was called back then, which showed Italian horror, it was on the trash heap. And now, of course, it’s high up because of Mr Luca and his film. So I’m waiting for pornography to get to that, maybe he’ll do a remake of Bijou, I don’t know. I always enjoyed films which were seen as disreputable. There was always okay, this is interesting, let’s look for the trash. I think part of the filmmaker’s job is to be a bit like a vulture, a scavenger, to find things that people would turn their noses up at. So I think you can find great filmmaking anywhere.

Yes, it's something you'll need to cure, but while they're occurring, it's much like being sick with a cold. You don't get mad at yourself for sneezing, so you shouldn't try to fight your thoughts or see them as a bad part of your personality while you're still dealing with your disorder.

Acceptance is crucial. These thoughts are not in your control, and not something you should expect to control. Learn to accept that they're a natural part of the disorder and that when you treat your disorder you'll have fewer of these thoughts.

The MacBook Pro with M1 (from $1,299) is a laptop with an unbeatable combo of power and endurance, making it a fantastic laptop even now it's been surpassed by the MacBook Pro with M2. And I know this because I’ve been using this system for months to plow through my workload, and I can barely get this machine to stutter no matter what I throw at it.Thanks to the M1 chip, the Apple Silicon inside this 3-pound beast runs circles around most Windows laptops when it comes to sheer performance. Just as important, the new MacBook Pro M1 outlasts the competition on battery life — by a lot. We’re talking more than 16 hours of endurance. My only complaint is that Apple hasn’t touched the design.

When we talk about exclamation points, people often think we’re talking about tone. But what goes unsaid is that tone is the performance of niceness or seriousness. It is the work of matching sentence structure to gender norms, industry norms, workplace norms, and generational norms. It is switching norms dozens if not hundreds of times a day, as you shift from text to email, from group chat to professional Teams Message. And we are doing this Tone Work exponentially more than at any point in history.

Tone Work is not new. But technological advances that promised to allow us to communicate more efficiently have, in practice, also allowed us to communicate more, and created an expectation that all others communicate more in return. Hence: overflowing email accounts, proliferating group texts (and group text guilt), hours if not days dedicated to catching up on Slack. Dealing with that communication is exhausting, in part because it involves so much tone work.

I started grading, which meant I had to figure out the “compliment sandwich” at the end of the essay. The first sentence would start with praise, then an em-dash, then the real news: what needed work. A short list of things to refine, ending with encouragement, almost always capped with an exclamation point. This is a fantastic first draft, and I look forward to seeing the second! An embodiment of my teaching style, really: I’m so happy you’re here, I want us to talk seriously about how to become better writers and thinkers, but I also don’t ever want you to leave a conversation or class or piece of feedback from me feeling like shit.

If you think someone’s written communication style is off, or wrong, or bitchy: see if it’s possible to clarify their intention without asking them to change their tone.

When you observe a human life from a far enough distance, all the trials and tribulations just become rounding errors.

Dostoyevsky said that to love someone means to see them as God intended, so why on earth shouldn’t you also be a ‘someone’? This makes me think that sometimes you have to try to look at yourself through the eyes of God: how tiny and lacking, yet how precious and important; how flawed and powerless, yet unique and loved.

There’s something very calming about believing that nobody cares about what you do, that you could just be whatever you want to be. It grants you a kind of unlimited confidence, like flooring the gas pedal on your free will. It’s liberating to think that you’re not special — not because you aren’t valuable, but because you aren’t as offensively powerful as you might think. Humility, or the simple act of focusing less on yourself without reducing your sense of self-worth, can be the ultimate source of peace.

I want to see, in hindsight, that misfortunes haven’t hardened my heart — I want to look back and see a survivor. I want to see that heartaches have not smothered my passion and that sadness was not able to keep me down for long.

You may be existentially “trapped” in the present, but your perspective doesn’t have to be. With enough distance from your own timeline, every mistake blurs into a minor miscalculation, and every letdown diminishes to insignificance. Even a bad memory, with enough time, will appear trivial — it might transform you but its colors will fade into a wistful sepia.

Hassabis pointed to the example of AlphaFold, DeepMind’s machine-learning system that had predicted the structures of 200mn proteins, creating an invaluable resource for medical researchers. Previously, it had taken one PhD student up to five years to model just one protein structure. DeepMind calculated that AlphaFold had therefore saved the equivalent of almost 1bn years of research time.

DeepMind, and others, are also using AI to create new materials, discover new drugs, solve mathematical conjectures, forecast the weather more accurately and improve the efficiency of experimental nuclear fusion reactors. Researchers have been using AI to expand emerging scientific fields, such as bioacoustics, that could one day enable us to understand and communicate with other species, such as whales, elephants and bats.