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When astronauts return from space, they are carried out of their capsule because the full effect of Earth’s gravity, felt instantaneously upon landing, is strong enough to break bones. After months of floating in zero-G, your muscles atrophy, bone density drops, fluids redistribute, and your balance and sense of spacial orientation recalibrate. It takes time for the body to readjust to what used to be normal. Heartbreak feels a lot like coming back down to Earth because falling in love is akin to taking flight: Known to many by his Latin name only, Cupid (desire), the Greeks called the god of love Eros and often portrayed him as a handsome young man with rosy skin and large, lovely wings. The Greeks visualized this feeling of love by adding “pt” to “eros”, forming “pteros”, meaning “wing”: We take flight when we surrender to romance, letting it take us from over here to over there. Longing for someone is an invitation for us to travel from the status quo to a new world; perhaps, the reason why eroticism can be thrilling, embarrassing, or repulsive to talk about is because it offers us adventure — one of novelty and danger.

All of these promises are very Trumpian: Big, bold ideas that are (in many cases) widely supported by the vast majority of Americans, but are also obviously vague, in some cases not realistic, and very "strongman" in their attitude (like promising to punish protesters and conduct mass deportations).

The fundamental question in Friday’s ruling boiled down to: ‘who decides,’ courts or agencies? The conservative majority’s answer — courts — affects everything from clean air to drug safety to student loans, the broad landscape of government regulation. And that power matters more than ever now that Trump, who had appointed 28 percent of federal judges by the time he left office, has the prospect of naming more in a second term.”

A library is like going to Ikea. You already have a home, but you need a bit of help with furniture. You don’t feel like making your own table from scratch. Ikea allows you to pick and choose different things to go in your home. You are in control. A framework, on the other hand, is like building a model home. You have a set of blueprints and a few limited choices when it comes to architecture and design. Ultimately, the contractor and blueprint are in control. And they will let you know when and where you can provide your input.

Dating apps don’t work, and meeting people in person seems foreign, even impossible. But it was dating apps that drove IRL connections nearly extinct. In other words, dating apps did work, for almost a decade, by promising to cut out all the things about in-person dating that made us feel vulnerable or uncomfortable. Rejection now happens with a swipe, out of sight, with neither party the wiser. If you match and then change your mind, you can just unmatch without explanation.

This arc plays out across all kinds of apps, and all kinds of human relationships, as tech companies seek to find and solve every type of “friction” and discomfort. But those efforts are rooted in the mistaken idea that being a person shouldn’t come with difficult emotions—that we aren’t often, in fact, served by hard conversations or uncomfortable feelings.

A diplomatic “no” is when you’re clear about your feelings but empathetic to how the person on the receiving end might interpret those feelings.

Girl mossing recognises a need to step away from the pressures of modern, urban life, promoting spending time in nature as a restorative practice. The fast pace and pressure of neoliberal capitalism take an enormous toll on wellbeing: not just personal, but social and planetary. These pressures are most acutely felt by women – whose labour remains, in large part, undervalued and underpaid – and by young people, who are often in precarious work, priced out of the housing market. Yet they’re still bombarded with images of unattainable success on social media. Not so the moss selfies.

Girl rotting is another subversive form of rest and retreat, focused on being intentionally “unproductive” at home.

In China, there’s a parallel rise in “tangping/lying flat” among Chinese young people who are “rejecting high-pressure jobs” in favour of a “low-pressure life”, and in “bai lan” (letting things rot), “a voluntary retreat” from pursuing goals that are now seen as “too difficult to achieve”.

We typically strive for material rewards through hard work and achieve success through doing. We celebrate the “wins”: the promotion, the new house, marriage, the birth of children. By contrast, we really struggle “when things fall apart”, as they inevitably do, particularly when we are confronted with old age, sickness, and death – basically, with human decomposition.

Make no mistake: this is a promotional exercise for Apple Music more than it is criticism. Sure, most lists of this type are also marketing for publications like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork and NME. Yet, for how tepid the opinions of each outlet often are, they have each given out bad reviews. We can therefore infer they have specific tastes and ideas about what separates great art from terrible art.

After Steve Jobs’ death came a river of articles questioning the internal culture he fostered, with several calling him an “asshole”. But that is mixing up a mean streak and a critical eye — Jobs, apparently, had both

It does not interrogate which albums are boring, expressionless, uncreative, derivative, inconsequential, inept, or artistically bankrupt. So why should we trust it to explain what is good? Apple’s ranking of albums lacks substance because it cannot say any of these things. Doing so would be a terrible idea for the company and for artists.

It is beyond my understanding why anyone seems to be under the impression this list is anything more than a business reminding you it operates a music streaming platform to which you can subscribe for eleven dollars per month.

For years, poll after poll from around the world has found high levels of distrust in their influence, handling of private data, and new developments. If these corporations were at all worried about this, they are not much showing it in their products — particularly the A.I. stuff they have been shipping. There has been little attempt at abating last year’s trust crisis. Google decided to launch overconfident summaries for a variety of search queries. Far from helping to sift through all that has ever been published on the web to mash together a representative summary, it was instead an embarrassing mess that made the company look ill prepared for the concept of satire. Microsoft announced a product which will record and interpret everything you do and see on your computer, but as a good thing.

why should we turn to them to fill gaps and needs in society? I certainly would not wish to indulge businesses which see themselves as entirely separate from the world.

These product introductions all look like hubris. Arrogance, really — recognition of the significant power these corporations wield and the lack of competition they face. Google can poison its search engine because where else are most people going to go? How many people would turn off Recall, something which requires foreknowledge of its existence, under Microsoft’s original rollout strategy?

There seems to be little attempt at persuasion. Instead, we are told to get on board because this rocket ship is taking off with or without us.

this isn’t just Apple’s chance to show it’s doing AI right. It’s also an opportunity to redefine the conversation about AI to make it more substantive and results-oriented–and, of course, to make Apple look better while doing it.

Days before gadget reviewers weighed in on the Humane Ai Pin, a futuristic wearable device powered by artificial intelligence, the founders of the company gathered their employees and encouraged them to brace themselves. The reviews might be disappointing, they warned.Humane’s founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, were right. In April, reviewers brutally panned the new $699 product, which Humane had marketed for a year with ads and at glitzy events like Paris Fashion Week. The Ai Pin was “totally broken” and had “glaring flaws,” some reviewers said. One declared it “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed.”

In recent months, the company has also grappled with employee departures and changed a return policy to address canceled orders. On Wednesday, it asked customers to stop using the Ai Pin charging case because of a fire risk associated with its battery.

Its setbacks are part of a pattern of stumbles across the world of generative A.I., as companies release unpolished products. Over the past two years, Google has introduced and pared back A.I. search abilities that recommended people eat rocks, Microsoft has trumpeted a Bing chatbot that hallucinated and Samsung has added A.I. features to a smartphone that were called “excellent at times and baffling at others.”

This account of Humane is based on interviews with 23 current and former employees, advisers and investors, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter or feared retaliation.

Many current and former employees said Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno preferred positivity over criticism, leading them to disregard warnings about the Ai Pin’s poor battery life and power consumption. A senior software engineer was dismissed after raising questions about the product, they said, while others left out of frustration.

From the beginning, current and former employees said, the Ai Pin had issues, which reviewers later picked apart.One was the device’s laser display, which consumed tremendous power and would cause the pin to overheat. Before showing the gadget to prospective partners and investors, Humane executives often chilled it on ice packs so it would last longer, three people familiar with the demonstrations said. Those employees said such measures could be common early in a product development cycle.

When employees expressed concerns about the heat, they said, Humane’s founders replied that software improvements reducing power use would fix it. Mr. Chaudhri, who led design, wanted to keep the gadget’s sleek design, three people said.

Some employees tried persuading the founders not to launch the Ai Pin because it wasn’t ready, three people said. Others repeatedly asked them to hire a head of marketing. The role remained vacant before the product’s release.

a senior software engineer was let go after she questioned whether the Ai Pin would be ready by April. In a company meeting after the dismissal, Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno said the employee had violated policy by talking negatively about Humane, two attendees said.

There’s an old joke that ‘AI’ is whatever doesn’t work yet, because once it works, people say ‘that’s not AI - it’s just software’.

Kennedy has suggested purging staff at federal health agencies and devoting half of the National Institutes of Health's budget to researching alternative health care.

Trump's pick would put one of the nation's foremost vaccine skeptics in charge of America's health care agencies. Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again campaign's proposals have already alarmed some public health experts.

It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.

We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.

“What we’ve seen,” says Ed Saperia, dean of the London College of Political Technology, “is controversial content drives engagement. Extreme content drives engagement.” Creating toxic content became a viable livelihood, which my 16-year-old, on football X, noticed way before I did: people saying patently wrong things for hate-clicks.

high-attention tweets go straight to the top of the For You feed, driven by a “black box algorithm designed to keep you scrolling”, as Rose Wang, COO of another rival, Bluesky, puts it, but the user experience is screeds of repetition on topics tailored to annoy you.

We saw the real-life effects of this when misinformation over the identity, ethnicity and faith of the killer of three young girls in Southport incited explicitly racist unrest across the UK this August, such as hasn’t been seen since the 70s. X, Mulhall says, “was a central hub not only for creating the climate for the riots, but also the organisation and distribution of content that led to riots”.

Governments, meanwhile, have no reliable redress, even when, as Mulhall puts it, “decisions made on the west coast of America are demonstrably affecting our communities”. In April, Brazil’s supreme court sought suspensions of fewer than 100 X accounts, for hate speech and fake news – mainly supporters of his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, disputing the legitimacy of his defeat. X refused, and declined to represent itself in court. On Monday, the court unanimously upheld a ban on the entire platform, arguing that it “considered itself above the rule of law”. It’s extraordinary that Musk didn’t do more to avoid that, from a business perspective, but it may be that there are things he values more than money, such as immunity from governmental or democratic constraint.

Donald Trump may have shocked the US legacy media by speaking directly to voters with coarse, increasingly unhinged messaging, but if we think a contented population, secure in a prosperous future, would have embraced his authoritarian lurch, we’re dreaming. Rage is out there, whether social media bankrolls it or not, and “all the mainstream platforms were generally failing on hate speech”, Mulhall says. “They didn’t want this content but they were struggling to deal with it. Then they would step up a bit after a Charlottesville [the white supremacist rally in 2017] or Capitol Hill.”

“Twitter has broken the mould,” Mulhall says. “It’s ostensibly a mainstream platform which now has bespoke moderation policies. Elon Musk is himself inculcated with radical right politics. So it’s behaving much more like a bespoke platform, created by the far right. This marks it out significantly from any other platform. And it’s extremely toxic, an order of magnitude worse, not least because, while it still has terms of service, they’re not necessarily implementing them.”

Musk’s commitment to free speech is jaw-droppingly unconvincing: he used it to reject Brazil’s demands, yet readily acceded to Narendra Modi’s demands in India, and suspended hundreds of accounts linked to farmers’ protests there in February this year. “Things like free speech are instruments to Musk, rather than principles,” Mulhall says. “He’s a tech utopian with no attachment to democracy.”

Musk has been named in a cyberbullying lawsuit brought by the gold medallist Imane Khelif. The boxer, who was born female and has never identified as either trans or intersex, was subjected to libellous claims about her gender by numerous public figures – British politicians, JK Rowling, Donald Trump – all on X. Andrew Tate, meanwhile, may have been charged by the Romanian authorities with human trafficking and rape, but his online misogynist fantasies of women as a slave caste, which have immense global reach, have attracted no censure greater than de-platforming, by YouTube, Insta, TikTok and Facebook – while the impact of these bans was lessened, even undone, by his freedom to operate on X

The main hurdle has been that people migrate in packs and until recently weren’t migrating fast enough. If they do, and Saperia is right, Bluesky and Threads (which now has 175 million active monthly users), will ultimately supplant X. Will it be the same? It can’t be – the free-for-all of the open web, from which Twitter created its famous “town square” discursive experience (anyone could chat, and look, the Coastguard Agency and CNN were also right there) has been replaced by a social media idea Saperia calls the “dark forest” and Wang describes as “you find your people in small spaces, and work together to build an experience that you want – basic human building blocks of interaction

Pennsylvania’s law disenfranchising voters who cast timely ballots but make an immaterial mistake is nonsensical. If a mailed ballot has arrived at election offices before Election Day, so we know it is timely, who cares if a voter has written in her birthdate rather than the correct date that she signed the ballot? The date requirement on a timely mailed ballot serves no purpose when state law requires ballots to be received by Election Day. Thousands of ballots are expected to be tossed in the upcoming election for this technical defect.

the pollster’s gratification comes from sitting alone in a room and finding that her numbers have correctly predicted waves of thought and movement, that the opinions shared over the phone that are then tabulated and aggregated have come together to predict perhaps even a moment in history.

Its main purpose is to keep me healthy and worry-free: exercise, staying aware of the weather (temperature, UV index, chance of rain), passively tracking my body (resting heart rate, sleep), and knowing the time + making sure I get where I’m supposed to go.

During lockdown, with nothing to do (college student at the time) or gyms to go to, my AW kept me sane. I spent my days focusing on my rings and trying new workouts. In a lot of ways it helped me build discipline and made me more active. It helped me come down from gym dependent 215lb guy to an always active and healthy 155lb-er in 6 months. It made me creative with exercise and enjoy being outside.

It’s widely established by now that Trump, who avoids all forms of unfriendly press, has rounded out his unwavering support from the right-wing media ecosystem by wholeheartedly embracing the “manoverse.” He’s appeared on bro-casts like This Past Weekend With Theo Von, Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant, and the Nelk Boys’ Full Send, among others, deepening a strategy of playing into the aesthetics and grievances of what’s often described as “disaffected young men,” a demographic that makes up a considerable portion of his base. These appearances take the shape of friendly hangouts where Trump and the hosts cover topics like sports, libertarianism, free speech, dads, and conspiracy theories, a topic that connects with the former president’s vigorous deployment of baseless claims. Trump’s campaign is so happy with this approach, apparently, that it seems to have fully integrated the digital subculture to further power its appeal. That’s how we ended up with the comedian-podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe, a.k.a. the host of the podcast Kill Tony, calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend.

in a culture supercharged by micro-celebrity and the internet, messiness is a kind of proxy for authenticity. As reflected by anything from Smartless to Call Her Daddy to any number of other reality-television podcasts, lasting episodes are ones containing moments that feel like you’re looking beyond the veil: a private revelation, the dispensing of tea, an instance of interpersonal friction, the emergence of an inside joke. This stacks the deck for Trump, a chaos agent whose primary gift is a capacity to make loud noises, redirect conversation, and keep your attention.

If Trump has successfully mapped his talent for making mess onto the basic incentives of a podcast, Harris is a classical operator still working with old media tactics. On Call Her Daddy and Club Shay Shay, Harris reiterated many of the same talking points and anecdotes she’s already delivered elsewhere. Speaking to Sharpe on the subject of grief and her late mother, Harris gave the same response as she did to Anderson Cooper during her CNN Town Hall on October 23. “Grief is difficult,” she says. “There are two sides to the coin. There are relationships in your life that touch you deeply, and then to lose that person, it leaves a big void.” It’s a thoughtful answer. It’s also too rehearsed to make a lasting impression on someone who, like Rogan, is interested in off-the-cuff remarks and visceral reactions.

In the 1960s, airlines were The Future. That is why old films have so many swish shots of airports in them. Airlines though, turned out to be an unavoidably rubbish business. I've flown on loads of airlines that have gone bust: Monarch, WOW Air, Thomas Cook, Flybmi, Zoom. And those are all busts from before coronavirus - times change but being an airline is always a bad idea.

That's odd, because other businesses, even ones which seem really stupid, are much more profitable. Selling fizzy drinks is, surprisingly, an amazing business. Perhaps the best. Coca-Cola's return on equity has rarely fallen below 30% in any given year. That seems very unfair because being an airline is hard work but making coke is pretty easy. It's even more galling because Coca-Cola don't actually make the coke themselves - that is outsourced to "bottling companies". They literally just sell it.

If you were to believe LinkedIn you would think a great business is made with efficiency, hard work, innovation or some other intrinsic reason to do with how hardworking, or clever, the people in the business are. That simply is not the case. What makes a good business is industry structure

Classically, there are five basic parts ("forces") to a company's position: The power of their suppliers to increase their prices The power of their buyers to reduce your prices The strength of direct competitors The threat of any new entrants The threat of substitutes It's industry structure that makes a business profitable or not. Not efficiency, not hard work and not innovation. If none of the forces are very much against you, your business will do ok. If they are all against you, you'll be in the position of the airlines. And if they're all in your favour: brill, you're Coca-Cola.

voting for morally reprehensible candidates doesn’t mean you necessarily share their vices. You will almost certainly be voting with a focus on the good things you hope they will do or with the belief that they will do more good than their opponents. You might have gotten something wrong — about how the world works, about what they will do, about what is good. Others can complain that you didn’t do your due diligence. Still, most Democrats, like most Republicans, are bound to have a lot of erroneous beliefs about what their candidate would have done. A preponderance of voters will fall short when it comes to meeting the standards of due diligence.

At the same time, your mother is, as you say, mistaken to speak of her vote as if it were nobody else’s business. For these purposes, the causal consequences of how she voted, in one state or another, is a distraction. It isn’t that any of us is casting the determining vote; it’s that we’re joining with others to achieve the results we favor, collectively sharing responsibility for the outcome if we succeed. And because she has been open about her previous two votes, people who know her are entitled to ask her why she cast them. If they can’t make sense of her answer, they’re free to reproach her or express their disappointment. That goes for you as well: Treating your mother with respect means being honest about your views. But it doesn’t mean cudgeling her with them. Once you’ve said your piece and listened to what she has to say in her defense, repeating the same arguments over and over would be the act of a bully.

At the same time, your mother is, as you say, mistaken to speak of her vote as if it were nobody else’s business. For these purposes, the causal consequences of how she voted, in one state or another, is a distraction. It isn’t that any of us is casting the determining vote; it’s that we’re joining with others to achieve the results we favor, collectively sharing responsibility for the outcome if we succeed. And because she has been open about her previous two votes, people who know her are entitled to ask her why she cast them. If they can’t make sense of her answer, they’re free to reproach her or express their disappointment. That goes for you as well: Treating your mother with respect means being honest about your views. But it doesn’t mean cudgeling her with them. Once you’ve said your piece and listened to what she has to say in her defense, repeating the same arguments over and over would be the act of a bully

your mother is, as you say, mistaken to speak of her vote as if it were nobody else’s business. For these purposes, the causal consequences of how she voted, in one state or another, is a distraction. It isn’t that any of us is casting the determining vote; it’s that we’re joining with others to achieve the results we favor, collectively sharing responsibility for the outcome if we succeed. And because she has been open about her previous two votes, people who know her are entitled to ask her why she cast them. If they can’t make sense of her answer, they’re free to reproach her or express their disappointment. That goes for you as well: Treating your mother with respect means being honest about your views. But it doesn’t mean cudgeling her with them. Once you’ve said your piece and listened to what she has to say in her defense, repeating the same arguments over and over would be the act of a bully.

Lee is chasing Allerton, but he’s really chasing a sense of self. This isn’t just a film about queer characters with a queer form — it’s also a film with very specifically queer motivations and conflicts. This is a film for anyone who has every desired assimilation, who has ever looked for self-love in self-hate, who has ever sought control with a desperate fuck.

Allerton is an idealized figure for Lee. (With their glasses and similar hair coloring, Allerton could even appear to be an idealized figure of Lee.) His disconnect from his queerness is a pull for Lee. The same way Lee wants to distance himself from the more feminine gays, he wants to run toward Allerton. It’s not just an addiction to desire, it’s an addiction to self-loathing.

Daniel Craig embodies Lee’s desire with an idiosyncratic charm. He may yearn for Allerton’s neutral normalcy, but, as portrayed by Craig, he’s undeniably queer. This isn’t shown with the obvious cues often inhabited when famous actors play gay. Instead, Craig finds the layers in Lee’s queer presentation — how he plays it up and how he tries to quiet it down.

On the one hand, I think the progressive trans movement has moved so far it’s trying to defend an untenable position: that all you have to do to gain access to a protected space is claim a protected identity for yourself. Imagine a situation where someone known to family and friends (and identifiable to the public) as a man declares one day that they are transitioning to female. Nobody could reasonably expect all girls and women to be comfortable with that person showing up in their bathroom or locker room a few days later. And yet, this isn't how transitioning always (or even often) works. To take the example at hand, Rep.-elect Sarah McBride is 34 years old. She was her student body president at American University in college, and in her final week in that role, she came out as trans in the school newspaper. She described how she wrestled with her gender identity, writing that being trans was her "deepest secret" and something that she "couldn't accept," thinking she had to pick a pursuit of politics over being trans and couldn't possibly do both together. That was over 12 years ago, and now she is an openly trans woman who has been elected to Congress. Regardless of your views on this issue, we should all be able to empathize with McBride and the intentionality behind her transition. She is not a confused teenager. She is not someone attaching themselves to an identity for personal gain, or to be a predator, or on a whim. She is an adult exercising her freedom to live as she chooses.

Many on the right seem to think they can just legislate trans people away — pretending that by excluding them they will somehow cease to exist. They won’t. Whether they exist because of gender dysphoria or ambiguous sex organs or social contagion is, for the purposes of legislation like this, irrelevant. As a pluralistic society, we should strive to create free societies for all.   At the same time, many on the left seem to think they can use academic theory to set the definitions of common words and reorganize social norms without listening to concerns about comfort level, fairness, basic differences among the sexes, and perceived or actual safety. This, too, is entirely unrealistic.

I genuinely think someone like McBride should be able to use the women's bathroom in Congress’s halls, yet I can also hold that this doesn't mean all self-identified trans women are entitled to all women's spaces. I wish more people could hold these things at the same time, too, but alas — that doesn’t appear to be the country we have.

Polls show that many of the policies enacted by President Biden are popular. His measures to reduce the cost of insulin and other drugs receive support from more than 80 percent of Americans. His infrastructure bill, his hawkish approach to China and his all-of-the-above energy policy, which combines expanded oil drilling with clean-energy subsidies, are popular, too. But voters obviously like some of his policies more than others. And an unusual pattern seems to be hurting Biden’s re-election campaign: Voters are less aware of his most popular policies than his more divisive ones.

Adam Green, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a Democratic-aligned group, blames what he calls fight theory. “It’s not enough to have positive messaging,” Green said. “Voters must see drama, clash and an ongoing saga in order for our message to break through a cluttered news environment.”

fights become the subject of political fundraising emails, activist campaigns, news stories and social media posts. Conflict attracts attention. The situation with Biden’s most popular economic policies — especially the reduction of medical costs — is somewhat different.

Taste has historically been reserved for conversation about things like fashion and art. Now, we look for it in our social media feeds, the technology we use, the company we keep, and the people we hire.

When I ask people what they mean by “taste,” they’ll stumble around for a bit and eventually land on something like “you know it when you see it,” or “it’s in the eye of the beholder.” I understand. Words like taste are hard to pin down, perhaps because they describe a sensibility more than any particular quality, a particular thing. We’re inclined to leave them unencumbered by a definition, to preserve their ability to shift shapes.

’ve found a taste-filled life to be a richer one. To pursue it is to appreciate ourselves, each other, and the stuff we’re surrounded by a whole lot more.

I can’t think of a piece of writing that does this more effectively than Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In her words, “a sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about... To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble.

Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

Someone could have impeccable taste in art, without producing any themselves. Those who create tasteful things are almost always deep appreciators, though.

we typically talk about it in binaries. One can have taste or not. Great taste means almost the same thing as taste.

They’re the people you always go to for restaurant or movie or gear recommendations. Maybe it’s the person you ask to be an extra set of eyes on an email or a project brief before you send it out.

It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention.

As John Saltivier says in an essay about building a set of stairs, “surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.”

To quote Susan Sontag again, “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.” The sought-after interior designer may not mind gas station coffee. The prolific composer may not give a damn about how they dress.

Taste in too many things would be tortuous. The things we have taste in often start as a pea under the mattress.

it is often formed through the integration of diverse, and wide-ranging inputs. Steve Jobs has said, “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

taste gets you to the thing that’s more than just correct. Taste hits different. It intrigues. It compels. It moves. It enchants. It fascinates. It seduces.

Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the world works, and also what they’re working with in their inner worlds. When we recognize  true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul. This is why it is so alluring.

many snobs (coffee snobs, gear snobs, wine snobs, etc.) often have great taste. But I would say that taste is the sensibility, and snobbery is one way to express the sensibility. It’s not the only way.

If rich people often have good taste it’s because they grew up around nice things, and many of them acquired an intolerance for not nice things as a result. That’s a good recipe for taste, but it’s not sufficient and it’s definitely not a guarantee. I know people that are exceedingly picky about the food they eat and never pay more than $20 for a meal.

creating forces taste upon its maker. Creators must master self-expression and craft if they’re going to make something truly compelling.

artists are more sensitive. They’re more observant, feel things more deeply, more obsessive about details, more focused on how they measure up to greatness.

Picasso remarking that “when art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” Taste rests on turpentine.

the process of metabolizing the world is a slow one. Wield your P/N meter well, take your time learning what you find compelling, and why. There are no shortcuts to taste. Taste cannot sublimate. It can only bloom. To quote Susan Sontag one last time, “taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.

Tracking Esther down at an after-hours club and marvelling at her artistry, he resolves to propel her into pictures. The number she performs at the club, “The Man That Got Away,” is one of the most astonishing, emotionally draining musical productions in Hollywood history, both for Garland’s electric, spontaneous performance and for Cukor’s realization of it. The song itself, by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, is the apotheosis of the torch song, and Garland kicks its drama up to frenzied intensity early on, as much with the searing pathos of her voice as with convulsive, angular gestures that look like an Expressionist painting come to life. (Her fury prefigures the psychodramatic forces unleashed by Gena Rowlands in the films of her husband, John Cassavetes.) Cukor, who had first worked wonders with Garland in the early days of “The Wizard of Oz” (among other things, he removed her makeup, a gesture repeated here by Maine), captures her performance in a single, exquisitely choreographed shot, with the camera dollying back to reveal the band, in shadow, with spotlights gleaming off the bells of brass instruments and the chrome keys of woodwinds.