Design of any kind requires empathy. If you’re making it for yourself, it’s a hobby. Everything else is for someone else. Great designers know who it’s for. And the design is for them, not for the designer. Annie Jean-Baptiste teaches us about restrictive design. This is what
There are plenty of good reasons a student might want to go to Harvard. One is its long history, at least by American standards; another is the formidable accomplishments of the professors hired to teach there. But on some level, a teenager looking to come up in the world — or,
In 1994, Charles Bukowski was buried in a Los Angeles cemetery, beneath a simple gravestone. The stone memorializes the poet’s name. It recites his dates of birth and death, but adds the symbol of a boxer between the two, suggesting his life was a struggle. And it adds the very
The Divorce Tapes (gift link). “The only music she listens to is heavy metal from 1986. It’s the year she still lives in. She wanted me to tell this story.” This is a tough read. (CW: rape, family trauma)
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy
To love is to sign a contract with loss. To love anyway is both the great tragedy and the great triumph of life. When two people have loved one another, each has become embedded in the marrow of the other’s being and both have had a profound experience that cannot be unhad even