“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider ..read more

A reader recently pointed me toward an intriguing letter, reproduced a few weeks ago in the always-impressive , that was originally sent from Pliny the Younger to his friend Minicius Fundanus around 100 AD. Among other topics, the letter touches on the difficulty of completing meaningful work in a distracted world ..read more

The right metaphor here is not “Let’s stick with horses, even though automobiles are around,” because automobiles were clearly a more energy and monetarily efficient way of moving things from A to B, just like email is clearly a more efficient way for me to deliver a memo to you than a fax machine. The metaphor is that it took a while before we figured out traffic rules and understood that it can’t just be cars going wild through the street. Eventually we figured out we need stoplights and lanes and traffic enforcement ..read more

So Del Toro took the natural next step: he bought a second house in the same neighborhood. His plan was to use the new residence to organize and store his growing collection and provide a quiet place for him to work. As an homage to Charles Dickens, he called it Bleak House. Del Toro recalled in a 2016 profile . “I guess that was the first, smallest version of my collection.” , he was able to indulge his collecting instinct more seriously, amassing “a vast physical collection of strange and wonderful memorabilia.” Eventually, Del Toro’s objects became too much to manage ..read more

for the BBC podcast , the novelist Ann Patchett discusses some of the difficulties that come along with finding success as a writer. She goes on to say that she finds it “pathetic” that she has to “block out time for thinking.” Patchett is not alone in this dismay:  many authors share a similar despair. (I remember my friend Ryan Holiday once putting it this way in an interview: “The better you become at writing, the more the world conspires to prevent you from writing ..read more

I take a closer look at the recent protests waged by Apple employees in response to CEO Tim Cook’s announcement that they had to return to their desks in Cupertino. On the surface, the employees were concerned about losing what they like about remote work. In an open letter addressed to Cook, they cited worries about time lost to commuting as well the difficulty of achieving “deep thought” in a crowded office. But as I conclude: “The tragedy of this moment…is how this reform movement lacks good ideas about what else to demand.” We learned through experience that working from home is not enough ..read more

the San Francisco-based rapper Larry June before he took the stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago. It’s this latter reputation, as an artist who ships original work at a fast pace, that makes what June admitted to the June has released 10 albums since 2018 , with his most recent, last summer’s , reaching number 39 on the Billboard 200. In addition to these projects, June has released 5 collaborative albums, 4 EPs, 5 Mixtapes, and made appearances as a guest artist on singles from artists like Post Malone ..read more

, I reported on how the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson writes in a “supervillain lair” built twenty feet underground near his otherwise unremarkable home in suburban Utah. According to , Sanderson is not, as it turns out, the first author to use extreme measures to generate fantastical inspiration. In 1894, an Irish actor who was struggling to write a novel in his spare time traveled with his wife and young son to the remote Aberdeenshire coast of northeast Scotland. They stayed in The Kilmarnock Arms, an oak-paneled hotel in the center of Port Erroll, a small fishing village located near ..read more

Laura knew these meager options weren’t going to produce a lot of new research. “You don’t need to be a professor to deduce how easily those three small spots could disappear,” she writes. With this reality in mind, Laura pushed Elizabeth to be more aggressive in carving out time for deep work. The result was the following more substantial schedule: ). Elizabeth came back with the following options ..read more

Two years after that, in 2014, Scott Young and I launched the first version of our online course , which operationalized many of the ideas from that book. Eight years and more than 5,000 student later, we’re opening the latest evolution of this course to new registrations starting Monday, August 29th. It was this upcoming launch — one of many of over the years — that got me reminiscing about my long history with thinking critically about career satisfaction, and led me, eventually, back this pragmatic gem of an essay from all the way back in 2008. It’s sometimes the smallest ideas, articulated ..read more