Aurora and Tithonus by Auguste Rodin (1905 or 1906)An all-too common position today when it comes to the arts (and creative work in general) is that quality is subjective. The individual consumer’s perception is paramount, and all attempts at subjecting art1 to criteria of quality feel wrong, somehow, mostly because nobody can agree on what those criteria should be in the first place; and because art is always changing. I was inspired to write this essay after reading Clancy Steadwell’s note ...

There is nothing more clarifying—and more terrifying—than a health scare. Something (I do not yet know what) happened to me one night in late November. My body, which for thirty-eight years had been humming quietly beneath my awareness, a small cat hidden beneath a blanket, purring gently, suddenly betrayed me. The purr became a snarl. Something thrashed about beneath the covers. I came away wounded, but how, where, and how deeply, remains to be seen. When your body speaks to you like this, y...

There has been a recent discourse on Substack about the uses and disuses of an MFA. Do you need one? Is it, actually, bad to have one? Is MFA-literature a genre, in the same way that horror or fantasy, or romance are? Is there a cabal of evil MFAers who are strangling contemporary literature in the cradle by refusing to publish anything other than their narrow circle of friends? Does getting an MFA ruin your writing? And so on. The true answer—as true answers tend to be—is boring. Having or n...

This is not the essay I meant to write. A few weeks ago, after promising to write more essays, I immediately started on the next one: a summary of Dorothea Brande’s 1934 book, Becoming a Writer. I thought this might be useful to people (I found the book energizing when I read it in 2022 shortly after the birth of my first son). I wrote 6,000 words summarizing Brande’s argument—that genius in writing is explicable and, therefore, teachable. Three years ago, I believed it. Now I’m not so sure. ...

For six years, I've been abandoning successful writing platforms the moment they started working—not because they failed, but because it wasn't the specific success I was looking for. I thought I was chasing better opportunities. I was actually running from my natural form.

An exploration of the structural problems that keep artists financially struggling despite unprecedented tools for creation and distribution. From winner-take-all dynamics to the passion premium, this essay maps the many pitfalls that prevent creative work from becoming sustainable careers - and why tech platforms promising to solve these problems often make them worse.

Why do we happily consume endless nonfiction on our phones but reach for physical books when we want fiction? I explore the fundamental tension between how we experience digital content and how fiction works in our minds.

What if Farcaster isn't just another social network with crypto features, but something entirely new—like the automobile was to horse-drawn carriages? This essay explores how Farcaster could transform social media by enabling users to build their own contextual experiences while maintaining a consistent identity across the web, just as cars transformed not just how we move, but how we live.

In one of the most interesting books I've ever read, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, authors Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman dismantle the widely-held view that to accomplish anything of importance, you must first set it as an objective—a specific goal with clear, legible, preceding steps. Our reliance on objectives is everywhere, from education to business, government to finance, and even science, art, and technology. Even the word objective encompasses a dual ...

"Publishing" is a word that no longer makes sense. What is missing in the "creator economy" is a strong curatorial element. Good work must be created, and it must be identified, amplified, and stored for the future.