jefftweedy

Bizarre Love Triangle (New Order cover)

I think part of it was an unwillingness to let go of that joke. And I think that's probably my only valid excuse other than obstinacy and overthinking.

themarginalian.org

The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle

That the Earth decided to make something this beautiful, when it could have just gone on making granite, felt like a miracle — the miracle of all those things unnecessary to survival, like music, like love, that give meaning to being alive.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Matt Spevack

I guess some might argue that reading would have the benefit of expanding my mind, but I already have so many creative and administrative projects I'm excited about that I can hardly keep up with my own ideas. That's my unapologetic justification for not reading.

jefftweedy

Tom Sawyer (Rush cover)

We should be suspicious of the people that don't have something that sustains them, and that they've fallen in love with. And Rush was absolutely something that gave people courage.

themarginalian.org

Carl Jung on Creativity

The creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will forever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscurely sensed, but never wholly grasped.

themarginalian.org

G.K. Chesterton on the Dandelion and the Meaning of Life

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

longreads.com

A Beastie Boy Returns to the Mic, With Some Help

Horovitz lent Skyler and Davis a 1980s-vintage sampler that came with floppy disks still holding Beastie Boys beats. "It's a time machine," Donaldson recalled with a chuckle. "They'd be trying to find a sound, and you'd randomly hear a drum break that was on a Beastie Boys song."

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: How the founder of Morning Brew built a Claude content machine that never runs out of ideas

AI slop is mostly a people problem, not a model problem. Alex's framing here is blunt: the only time the Content Machine produces slop is when the person being interviewed doesn't share interesting enough ideas during the interview. The model is shaping clay, not inventing ideas. If the clay is bad, the sculpture will be bad.

readtheprofile.com

Kevin O'Leary Is Happy Playing the Villain

Heroes are expected to be flawless. Villains are allowed to be human. Audiences may not always like them, but they remember them and connect with their flaws.

longreads.com

Skill Nostalgia

Nostalgia can be a toxic impulse, reactionary and uncritical, but it can also hold revolutionary potential for the future. Here, nostalgia is more than a self-soothing search for comfort; it's about engaging with loss, reconnecting with ideals that might improve the future.

honest-broker.com

The 10 Greatest Failures of Orson Welles

It's testimony to Welles's greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling. After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him.

jefftweedy

Take Me Home, Hot Stuff

Art, on the otherhand, is ever-expanding, like the universe itself, with limitless new frontiers to explore and question, and with possibilities for unending growth, understanding, and emotion.

whyisthisinteresting

The Death and Return of Browsing Edition

Record crates, video-store aisles, and bookshop tables were all machines for serendipity. What made them work was friction. They were slow, physical, and slightly annoying, and that was the engine.

lennysnewsletter.com

GPT-5.6 Sol vs. Claude Fable: Why OpenAI’s new model crushes my benchmark

Fable's precision and pedantry made it harder to collaborate with, and the exact moment Sol broke through where Fable got stuck.

honest-broker.com

What You Won't Learn About the Odyssey from a Movie

In both instances—the epic poet and jazz musician—the performer learns numerous stock phrases of specific metrical length, and often uses these repeatedly in live renditions. For Homer, these are the descriptors that recur in the Odyssey, such as "rosy-fingered Dawn" or "swift-footed Achilles." Jazz musicians do the same thing, but their building blocks are known as "licks."

themarginalian.org

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Alexis Page

I don't follow beauty brands or look at much beauty content. I like discovering my own things and consider myself to live outside of the beauty industry. It's how I develop my own ideas and see beauty through a larger cultural lens, rather than being bombarded with brand launches and product tutorials.

themarginalian.org

The Pain in You and the God in You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between Psychological Suffering and Creativity

Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. Every artist's art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through — the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without.

personalcanon.com

i'm teaching 2 workshops this summer and you're invited

Interlocutors can help draw out what matters most to us (in a particular project, or in our overall practice). Mission statements make our ambitions legible to ourselves and to the external world. But writing one can feel lonely and uncertain, like fumbling through the dark recesses of our psyches.

jefftweedy

Another Man's Done Gone

A belief that joy is defiant, and essential, in any kind of situation where you're actively resisting destructive powers.

dwarkesh.com

Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math

It's bizarre to have something with this superhuman breadth that knows all the fields so well, and yet isn't finding those lightning bolts that connect them. I think we're starting to see sparks of it actually finding connections between the things it's an expert at.

currincy

Flea Talks About How Jeff Parker Just Gets People, Including Him

There's like this combination of a deep knowledge of music, a very comfortable and tactile relationship with his instrument, and this sensitivity that he's listening and reacting. He's not, like, sticking to a plan of, 'I know what I can do, and this will work.' He's listening. And there's this river of music inside of Jeff—all the stillness and the violence and the chaos and the absolute ethereal beauty that he can bring to music through his playing.

currincy

Andrew Watt Talks About Making Paul McCartney’s “The Boys of Dungeon Lane”

I asked him how he's able to do that in front of everyone last night. He said really such an enchanting thing. Instead of sitting there and trying to tell someone else, 'No, no, it goes like this. No, no, do it like this,' you just do it yourself and then you know the way the song goes. You know what the drum part's supposed to be, what kind of groove you want. You're just beating yourself up to get it right.

stratechery.com

2026.26: Summer Vibes

fretting about the future can foreclose an appreciation at how incredibly awesome this technology is, and that the possibilities really are endless. You can do anything — even organize your garage. That might sound silly, but technology, for all of its importance, is also fun, and I'm having a blast.

honest-broker.com

Authenticity in Music

The musicians who strike me as most authentic never realized that inauthenticity was even a choice—they wouldn't know how to arrive at that destination, even if you gave them a map and GPS coordinates. Discovering this kind of authenticity is a gift, but it's an unusual kind of gift—defined as much by what you relinquish, not what you gain.

themarginalian.org

Life Is a Story That Begins in the Middle: Bayo Akomolafe on the Rewilding Power of Obstacles

Obstacles are the universe's hubs of unspeakable creativity, redeeming us from tired victories, from the banality of crossing the finish line, from the soundtrack of getting everything we want, and especially from the hubris of thinking we are in control. The moment an obstacle bisects the trajectory of intent, it creates a natural midpoint that is both an end and a beginning, but also something else entirely, for it lives on a different plane from the strict linearity of the will as cause and its intended effect.

themarginalian.org

Insomnia and the Secret Life of Ideas: Kafka on the Relationship Between Sleeplessness and Creativity

But while lack of sleep does diminish basic functions like reflexes and recall, paradoxically, the brink of sleep can be salutary to creativity: In that liminal space between restlessness and rest, the mind's organizing principles begin to fray with the fatigue of the day's conscious labors and unbidden thoughts begin to emerge from the recesses of the unconscious, begin to collide with one another in the seething cauldron of the insomniac's angst, begin to form the unexpected combinations we call originality.

jefftweedy

Let's Build a Car (Swell Maps cover)

The best rock stars, in my opinion, are the true believers who put themselves together for the sheer joy of inventing themselves.

readtrung.com

Pixar's $6 Billion Lunch

In the summer of 1994, there was a lunch. Me, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, the late Joe Ranft all sat down [at the Hidden City Cafe in Point Richmond, California near Pixar's head office]. Toy Story was almost complete and we thought 'well jeez, if we're going to make another movie, we better get started now'. So at that lunch, we knocked around a bunch of ideas that eventually became A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo. The last one we talked about that day was the story of a robot named Wall-E.