Empathy and good advice | Seth’s Blog
Focus groups and informal feedback offer a trap: Asking someone in the target audience if they like something might get you useful feedback. But most […]
Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning – The Marginalian
“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth […]
The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity – The Marginalian
“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings — the […]
“In its larval state” | Seth’s Blog
Thirty years ago, Cory Doctorow did an interview showing primitive inklings of the internet future (music, videos, etc.). At the time, it was easy to […]
Kafka on the Relationship Between Sleeplessness and Creativity – The Marginalian
Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind […]
The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go – The Marginalian
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in one of the great masterpieces of poetry. “Every mortal loss is an Immortal […]
Promotion, activation, conversation | Seth’s Blog
[A long riff on book publishing with (perhaps) wide applicability to your work as well.] Publishing is different from writing—it’s the hard work of creating […]
Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up – The Marginalian
It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is […]
Oliver Sacks on the Necessity of Our Illusions – The Marginalian
“Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his pioneering work on transcendent experiences, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, […]
Degrees of freedom
When tech shows up, it offers a shortcut and convenience. You can use Google Maps to direct you somewhere without paying much attention to the […]
