Remember chain letters? Who knows? Maybe you still get one now and then. Personally, I haven’t seen one in the wild for years. When I realized this yesterday, it struck me as odd. I got a little wave of nostalgia, like, “Hey, remember when Bill Gates was going to

D’ya like writing? Great. D’ya like desks, too? Yeah, I figured. Behold: Abraham Roentgen’s Writing Desk [https://youtu.be/vC5Hqk7wl7U]. Prepare yourself for two hypnotic minutes of a curator methodically revealing all the mechanical surprises tucked into one elegant piece of wooden furniture: unfolding inkwell, pop-up reading

I’m at World Domination Summit [https://worlddominationsummit.com/] in Portland this weekend. (My visit to the City of Roses is especially poignant having just finished watching the final season of Portlandia. Goodbye, Fred and Carrie!) Chris Guillebeau [https://chrisguillebeau.com/] (author of The $100 Startup, Side Hustle, and The

Together with his wife, Georges Borchardt has run his eponymous literary agency since 1967; his career as an agent stretches back to his arrival in the United States shortly after the Second World War. Magnificent list, naturally: John Gardner, John Ashberry, Ian McEwan, Tracy Kidder, Elie Wiesel, Eugene Ionesco… I

> Formerly, when anyone said music I presented was experimental, I objected. It seemed to me that composers knew what they were doing, and that the experiments that had been made had taken place prior to the finished works, just as sketches are made before paintings and rehearsals precede performances.

> Learn to look; compare what is before you with your familiar or secret ideas. Do not see in a town merely houses, but human life and history. Let a gallery or a museum show you something more than a collection of objects, let it show you schools of art

Iteration. Good for iPhones. Also, Terminators. The T-800 is a perfectly adequate time-traveling murder robot, but Skynet gave the T-1000 a crucial feature: laminate flooring mode [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXsyn-9VLVA]. (Who needs to transform into a beat-up Chevy? Bumblebee’s got nothing on Robert Patrick.) Plus, the

Compare and despair: maybe there’s no use fighting it. A college writing prof once told me that fury about the success of her peers gave her the strength she needed to continue working. Comparisons tire me out, personally, but if resentment fuels you, why not use it? Even the

Roald Dahl was not a nice person. In fact, he was a real BFG. (The F does not stand for “friendly.”) The legendary Bob Gottlieb was Dahl’s American editor at one point. When Dahl threw a fuss about pencils—we’ll get to Dahl and his pencils in a

> The funny thing is, you don’t know when you’re at your best. You can wake up with a hangover and then go to work with three hours of sleep, and do great work. Or you could be rested up for a week and come down here and