The New Yorker Interview The director-actor-writer-producer talks about uncoupling with his brother and creative partner, his role in Season 2 of the HBO drama “Industry,” and his most ambitious project yet: “a comedy relationship movie, thriller-action movie, mystery, coming-of-age story.” July 17,…
Juan B. Ramírez
Download a special PDF version of this memo here In early 2020, right before the pandemic, we released a memo titled The Umami Theory of Value. Written as a kind of elegy for the experience economy and the excesses of the preceding decade, we’ve been quite happy how, in retrospect, it managed to…
“The anti-American obsession: it’s all in me, I confess. America is terrifying. Its internal unbalances appear extreme (economic, cultural, racial), an unimaginable fragility. It concerns us closely as a mirror of the future — our future, if we still have one.” Thus ran the closing paragraph of a…
1. I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems. An ambitious project—but sensible, I think. And it seems to me that contemporary American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition—a modesty, alas, genuine…if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense. Of…
Community college was paradise. The cost per credit was $16 and the campus resembled an outlet mall. My classmates included people of all ages, races, creeds, and stages of pregnancy. Due to budget cuts the library was open for about 20 minutes a day and the cafeteria had been requisitioned as a…
The funny thing about sleeplessness is how action-packed it is. Late last night I lay in bed doing my best to mimic a corpse while my brain played pinball. I switched to my stomach, back, side. Opened two windows. Took off nightgown. Put nightgown back on. Arranged myself diagonally across the bed,…
Guest Essay The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs Dec. 28, 2022 Credit...Ali Asaei for The New York Times By Mr. Blackman is an adviser to government and corporations on digital ethics
Jumpsuit by Fendi. Glasses Stylist’s Own. In Cinnamon in the Wind, Kate Berlant’s 2019 stand-up special, released this year after lingering in a kind of post-production purgatory, the 35-year-old comedian briefly dangles a carrot of autobiography to her audience. It’s a rare moment for a performer…
From Mary Manning’s portfolio Ciao! in issue no. 242. The sadness of thinking about a year in reading is how little of it endures! As I try to recover lost time by rereading the terrible handwriting in my journal I find so many abandoned or forgotten books, and even the ones that remained in my…
Five weeks to the day after my debut novel was published, my boyfriend, who is a writer, broke up with me because I am a writer. I’ve been a writer for a long time. So has he. Until this summer, he was unquestionably the more publicly prominent one. When I told my friends about the breakup, they…
Poolside at the home of collector Tony Tamer. Photo by author. LARRY GAGOSIAN DIDN’T FLY DOWN for the twentieth anniversary of Art Basel Miami Beach. This was described to me by Vanity Fair’s art reporter Nate Freeman as “gossip.” And perhaps, were I an art reporter, it would strike me as such. At a…
Bill Gates wheels a hefty metal barrel out onto a stage. He carefully places it down and then faces the audience, which sits silent in a darkened theater. “When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war,” he begins. Gates is speaking at TED’s flagship conference, held in…
"...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day." Charles Dickens July 2009 One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the…
This is one of the lessons that every writer comes to appreciate: writing is thinking. Writing is not the artifact of thinking, it’s the actual thinking process. There’s no shortage of great quotes on this topic, the implications are less clear: Writing is the planning process and the final product:…
Spam is rampant Running your own server is a major pain If you aren't on gmail, gmail assumes you're sending spam Everyone else is on gmail Attachment limits are obnoxious and arbitrary Nobody knows how to validate addresses Configuring TLS, SPF, DKIM, submission, etc. is confusing Random DNSBLs…
Last year, when my mother moved apartments, I came into possession of a largeish Prada box full of my childhood diaries. They go from 1981—I was four, and dictated the diary to my aunt—up to the nineties. I still haven’t read most of them. (I think it was a handbag, and not a small one, that…
Vitalik Buterin is one of the most well-known and best-loved figures in the crypto/blockchain world — well-known because Ethereum, the blockchain platform he co-created (with Gavin Wood) has become the platform for the entire web3 world, and best-loved because he’s very clearly just a smart,…
DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at By Ed Zitron · Over 21,000 subscribers Share
"Sam Bankman-Fried" by Cointelegraph is licensed under CC BY 3.0. I was going to get up and write about the election today, but the Democrats did so unexpectedly well that control of both the House and the Senate is still uncertain. So I think I’ll write a post about the other big thing that just…
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When I pictured Matthew Perry, the actor frequently known as Chandler Bing, I saw him on the tangerine couch at Central Perk or seated on one of the twin recliners in the apartment he shared with Joey Tribbiani.
You fucked up real good, kiddo. Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your…
Happy spooky season, ghouls! While in Berlin I recorded an episode on my fave galaxy-brain podcast New Models, where we discussed the changing landscape of drugs—from legalization grifts to “spectrum sobriety” and the gentrification of club drugs. I got so caught up with the report on weird club…
A knight plays chess with death in Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal Angelicism01 is a fascinating newsletter that's enjoyed some well-deserved buzz over the past year. Calling itself “theoretical gossip
Culture Desk The Oakland-based newsletter has created a new way of talking about style and design. December 10, 2021 Each dispatch evokes the zine era, from the luridly Photoshopped collages to a spastic writing voice that careens down the page in a stream of florid, hypebeast doggerel.Image…
Photo: Creston Funk If you’re a prodigious reader of liner notes, you’ve probably seen Jon Brion’s name somewhere over the last 30 years. Brion garnered attention among the blossoming ’90s singer-songwriter set as a producer, session player, and finisher, a guy who shows up with dozens of…
Monday, 0400h. Outside the desert air blew cold and tight and I felt sorry for myself. A man named William in a Hyundai Tucson picked me up from the tawdry STRAT Hotel, Casino & Skypod where I’d blown
DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at By Ed Zitron · Over 21,000 subscribers Share
History is a nightmare from which the queers have awoken. Or so it would seem in Elif Batuman’s Either/Or (2022). It’s sophomore year at Harvard, and protagonist Selin is debating the merits of living either aesthetically or ethically. As in The Idiot (2017), she takes classes and reads; unlike in…
Is it good to go to war with contemporary literature? It’s at least a genre. A fun place to start is Elif Batuman’s eminently spicy “ Get a Real Degree ,” but there are many other places you could loo
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane, a reader-supported masterpiece newsletter. The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here. Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments. Mach 3+ city…
“This is the Unix philosophy: write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.” Computer software came to maturity in the late 1960s. While most programs to date had been written…
I just read and really enjoyed “Among the Reality Entrepreneurs,” James Duesterberg’s piece in The Point on Dimes Square, web3, and the funny characters involved in both. Duesterberg’s account of the scene, its strivings and fallacies, is rich and flecked with nice detail—he also keeps the…
Career advice as a genre is almost fatally flawed. With 160 million American workers across thousands of occupations in hundreds of industries, saying anything that is of use to all of them is practically impossible. The most common counsel is almost always too personal to be broadly applicable. My…
Books His work transformed the nature of philosophy and pushed followers toward the edge of comprehension. But his own nature, too, has long challenged comprehension. May 9, 2022 Philosophy appeared on the right-hand pages of the wartime journals; more intimate confessions, coded, were on the…
Nonfiction In “Status and Culture,” W. David Marx sets out to unravel the grand mysteries of identity. Is the internet draining status value?Credit...Martin Parr/Magnum Photos By Sept. 6, 2022 AmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshop.org When you purchase an independently reviewed…
Bouffées d’affadissement Not long ago, I was chatting with an older friend who is a retired engineer and also something of a writer, but not of fiction. When he heard that I had just finished a translation of Madame Bovary, he said something like, “But Madame Bovary has already been translated. Why…
Guest Essay New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church Aug. 9, 2022 Ariel DavisCredit...By Ariel Davis By Ms. Yost is a senior editor at First Things magazine. As senior churchmen seek to make Cat
We have generational trauma . We are living through a global pandemic . We are literally neurodivergent and a minor . We are riddled with climate grief . We are, for one reason or another, unable to c
This past Friday I attended the filming of Peter Vack’s new movie, www.RachelOrmont.com, and I found myself in a literal theater of cruelty self-destruction psychosis. What I thought was going to be a “filmed party” where I would be interviewed for 60 seconds and then float around observing people…
Books A crop of new books reconsiders feminism’s stance toward men. August 1, 2022 Two recent books argue that feminism should pay attention to male suffering.Illustration by Alain Pilon Ten years ago, Hanna Rosin’s book, “The End of Men,” argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that…
No articles.