I use the word 'interlocutor' to describe someone who is invested in your work and helps you understand it more deeply, but is not directly involved in the way a collaborator would be. Interlocutors can help draw out what matters most to us (in a particular project, or in our overall practice).
If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I've grown older I've learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.
1d ago
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.
But I often remind myself that the topics that make people uncomfortable are usually the ones that matter the most. So instead of backing away, I did the only thing I know how to do — I tried to understand. I saw the mask drop, and for a brief moment, the polished answers disappeared, and I got to see the real person underneath.
When a doctor finally noticed, he asked Bram to open his eyes when he heard the street he lived on being read out. The doctor named some random streets and then said, 'American Road.' Bram opened his eyes and his dad said, 'I knew it!'
2w ago
The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for an audience, and the fact of his not expecting any particular reader does not prevent him from having a vague composite picture in his mind of the sort of people who will eventually read him.
We are trained to read well-crafted sentences and intellectual sounding texts as the result of effortful human work and thus pay attention to these AI written comments when we see them. But there is often no human meaning there, these posts are just meaning-shaped attention vampires that take mental effort to decode and give you no equivalent understanding in return.
Even if you think you have no interest in those topics, it's hard not to be drawn in by Em's super smart writing and analysis, which regularly broadens out to examine wider cultural and societal issues.
When you see anger, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Anger is the secondary emotion. The primary emotion could be sadness, could be disappointment, could be stress.
4w ago
The eye is not merely a physical organ, but the supreme instrument of touch, and as such it is the very fountain of human expression and communication.
Such an evocative and weird lyric. Beautifully empathetic and sad. I tried to do an acoustic version, where I don't really scream it, but it just doesn't communicate. So I had to stand up and sing full-throated.
Judges check page length before reading a word. • Long brief? We read faster and with less attention. • Short brief? We slow down and pay closer attention. Brevity signals confidence.
It's all too easy to slip into doing a softball puff piece — fawning all over your guests and treating them like gurus dispensing wisdom from a mountain. This is an even easier trap for someone like Dwarkesh, who is very young and who is primarily known for interviewing people instead of for dispensing his own thoughts. So it's extremely impressive that he consistently avoids this trap — he always manages to challenge and provoke his subjects, rather than just letting them spout their usual talking points.
Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant.
Gray literature's high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else's water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious.
I love really loud music. My favorite music in the world is built upon that necessity for volume. But at the same time, I think there's something very unsettling and intense about quiet music. There are definitely periods when I just want to whisper. I want people to lean in and get closer to me.
The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn't naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.
1mo ago
We do not think in words alone. We think in images, in sensations, in the movement and flow of muscle and nerve. Yet we must clothe our thought in words to communicate it, and so our words always betray the living truth a little.
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.
When you start writing directly for readers, without intermediaries, that begins to happen naturally. Above all, I decide to treat the reader as a trusted friend—with the hope that you might extend the same courtesy to me.
There's so much to learn and to savor in friction, he suggests, be it waiting for a song on the radio to complete a prized mixtape or the deep connection we can find if we go through the time and trouble to ditch electronic communication and actually meet others, face to face.
1mo ago
The natural object is always the adequate symbol. I naturally dress my thoughts in pictures.
It is, of course, impossible to ever fully know what it is like to be someone else — this is the cost of consciousness, singular and secretive as it is; impossible, too, to fully convey to another what it is like to be you. The dream of perfectly clear vision is indeed just a dream. But we can always see a little more clearly in order to love a little more purely.
She wants to identify how he chooses and places words with the intention of producing material effects on the reader's body. How, exactly, does he make hearts beat faster, stomachs lurch and palms prickle with sweat?
I've spent years missing out on what I presume to be a never-ending group chat in which my closest friends, their siblings, one guy someone worked with for a summer in college, and another whom we randomly met at a bachelor party weekend all roast one another in ways that feel, at least occasionally, like love.
There are lyrics in it that distill something a lot of people spend their entire lives writing songs to try and say, like: I see what I see I don't see what I can't
One area where Andromeda found that Abi really shines: communication with residents who speak languages other than the staff's English-first backgrounds. Senior residents dealing with age-related memory loss or conditions like dementia often revert back to their first languages, notes Cameron McPherson, CEO of Medical & Aged Care Group, one of Andromeda's first customers.
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
