themarginalian.org

20 Favorite Children’s Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian

The best children's books are works of philosophy in disguise, shining a sidewise gleam on the fundamental questions we live with, articulating in the language of children, which is the language of great simplicity and great profundity, the most complex truths about being human.

currincy

I Profiled Neil Young and Dinosaur Jr. and Interviewed Sturgill Simpson—Plus, an Old Record I Now Love

Listening feels a little like watching a river move through a cluster of rocks, breaking apart for a moment and then merging. But the rendition that really gets me, that I keep playing again and again, is a slowed version of Landis' original—about 32 minutes, or five times the initial length. To go back to that river, it's like the water is half-frozen now, moving between the chutes of rock with the speed of a slurry.

upstartsmedia.com

Synthesia’s AI Avatars Can Now Conduct Live Surveys. I Made One To Try.

"There's a lot of areas in business today where we set up meetings between two humans because we have to, right? And a lot of that is actually because we want to avoid writing things."

themarginalian.org

James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

stratechery.com

Write Things Down

Biological evolution is the slowest and most permanent form of learning, but it takes millennia; oral communication is like a context window, effective but lossy; actually writing things down is what made learning extendable and scalable.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: How this PM uses Claude to handle 70% to 80% of his workday

Self-improvement loops learn from the difference between what the AI drafted and what the person actually sent. Daniel built a weekly skill that compares Claude's original drafts with his final versions, then uses those differences to improve future work. It resembles Alex Lieberman's 'write like me' loop, but it relies less on explicit feedback. Instead, it observes Daniel's actual behavior and learns from the small edits he makes instinctively.

whyisthisinteresting

The AI and Writing Edition

The other problem, I think, is that good writing is fundamentally anti-consensus. For writing to be above average, it shouldn't sound like everything else. My daughter might get a fine grade aping the teacher's example essay, but the road to good, or even great, is doing it your own way.

platformer.news

The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief

I think there is a real dirty secret right now, which is that almost every writer is using it. Just, most of them are not saying so.

themarginalian.org

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tenets of Storytelling

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

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.

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.

longreads.com

Happy Fucking Birthday

"Dear Mr. Benjamin Franklin," wrote a seventh grader from Winterville, Georgia. "In your time, the United States hardly existed. As I am writing this letter, it is almost the semi quincentennial, and BOY does the US exist now!"

dwarkesh.com

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents. Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career's lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici.

longreads.com

The End of Books

Paging through nearly three thousand library books, I saw her talk back to them, disagree with them, question and antagonize and struggle with them. In one, she penciled the word succotash —the nineteenth-century equivalent of nonsense ; on the fly of another, inscribed to her lover William Morton Fullerton, she composed a four-stanza poem that does not exist anywhere else in her own hand.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Alfred Tong

It can't have feelings. It doesn't have taste, instinct or chemistry. Those things remain profoundly human, and they're essential to good writing. But AI is brilliant at structure and organisation.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jake Newby

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.

whyisthisinteresting

The Creative Parent Edition

Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back.

3quarksdaily.com

Zen and the Art of Persuasive Writing

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.

3quarksdaily.com

Writing Advice from Scott Alexander

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.

honest-broker.com

The 10 Most Popular Articles from The Honest Broker (2021-2026)

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.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 100 (!)

You feel it in your chest—a deep rumble, then an explosion that makes your ears ring.

3quarksdaily.com

The writing secrets of Stephen King

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?

honest-broker.com

Why Read the Classic Books?

These older books have a sense of integrity. This project was just an opportunity for me to go back to some of my favorite books and look at the ways that's true.

3quarksdaily.com

Review of “Nonesuch” by Francis Spufford

If you aren't bent gigglingly over your manuscript, like a stock photo model alone with her salad, then what's the point of any of it?

jefftweedy

Year of the Horse

I want to feel what it feels like to make that song go. I think that's taught me to recognize when a song of my own feels right. The same excitement I feel about someone else's song, the desire to be moved, is intact when I'm trying to write my own.

longreads.com

A Sojourn into the Stephen King Archive: ‘The Dark Half’

The archived typescript shows that King approached the processes of drafting and revising this novel as a real-time collaboration between himself and Bachman, whom he treated as an alter ego.