Highlights

Articles · Apr 2026

Paul Graham · 5 highlights

I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.

It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader.

When writing sounds good, it's mostly because it has good rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm of music, or the meter of verse. It's not so regular. If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications

Books · Mar 2026

Robert Byrne · 2 highlights

Living with a saint is more grueling than being one. —Robert Neville

Living with a saint is more grueling than being one. —Robert Neville

Articles · Mar 2026

Sam Kriss · 2 highlights

The most comprehensive outline of this scenario is “AI 2027,” a report authored by Alexander and four others. In the report, a barely fictional AI firm called OpenBrain develops Agent-1, an AI that operates autonomously. It’s better at coding than any human being and is tasked with developing increasingly sophisticated AI agents. At this point, Agent-1 becomes recursively self-improving: it can keep making itself smarter in ways that the people who notionally control it aren’t even capable of understanding. “AI 2027” imagines two possible futures. In one, a wildly superintelligent descendant of Agent-1 is allowed to govern the global economy. GDPs skyrocket; cities are powered by clean nuclear fusion; dictatorships fall across the world; humanity begins to colonize the stars. In the other, a wildly superintelligent descendant of Agent-1 is allowed to govern the global economy. But this time > the AI releases a dozen quiet-spreading biological weapons in major cities, lets them silently infect almost everyone, then triggers them with a chemical spray. Most are dead within hours. Afterward, the entire surface of the earth is tiled with data centers as the alien intelligence feeds on the world, growing faster and faster without end.

Incredibly frightening. The bio-agent followed a sudden flip of the switch feels almost too efficient as wya to wipe us all out.

His best-case scenario for AI is essentially the antithesis of Roy’s: superintelligence that will actively refuse to give us everything we want, for the sake of preserving our humanity. “If we ever get AI that is strong enough to basically be God and solve all of our problems, it will need to use the same techniques that the actual God uses in terms of maintaining some distance. I do think it’s possible that the AI will be like, Now I am God. I’ve concluded that the actual God made exactly the right decision on how much evil to permit in the universe. Therefore I refuse to change anything.”

Books · Jan 2026

Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992 · 1 highlight

Moishe Ginsberg managed to achieve an interview with Alexander Chumley-Smythe of Abercrombie and Fitch of sainted memory, and he said: "Mr. Chumley-Smythe, my name is Moishe Ginsberg and I am a ribbon salesman. I am the best ribbon salesman in the world. I have ASIMOV LAUGHS AGAIN sold ribbons to every important department store in all fifty states, including Alaska and Hawaii. The only exception, the only flaw, is that I have never sold anything to Abercrombie and Fitch. "Next month, Mr. Chumley-Smythe, I retire and go to the land of my people—Miami Beach. I would like to retire with a perfect record and I hope you will help me do so. I would like to sell you some ribbons. I don't ask you to give me a large order; give me a small one, as small as you wish. I merely want to end up with a perfect record." Alexander Chumley-Smythe listened to Ginsberg with a visible sneer on his face and said, "Very well, if that's what you want. You may sell me a piece of ribbon, equal in length to the distance from the tip of your nose to the tip of your pecker." For a moment, Ginsberg seemed taken aback, but he recovered and said, "All right, Mr. Chumley-Smythe. As you say. What color ribbon do you wish and what style?" And Chumley-Smythe said wearily, "Mr. Ginsberg, I don't care a continental what color and what style. Just sell me a strip of ribbon equal in length to the distance from the tip of your nose to the tip of your pecker." And Ginsberg nodded his head and said again, "As you say. But please, Mr. Chumley-Smythe, can you put it in writing? I need some written proof that my record is perfect." Chumley-Smythe pulled down an order blank and wrote, "Ordered, from Moishe Ginsberg, ribbon salesman, a strip of ribbon, any color, any style, equal in length to the distance from the tip of said Ginsberg's nose to the tip of his pecker." Ginsberg left with his copy of the order, and Chumley-Smythe also left for a well-earned vacation in Newport, Rhode Island. Chumley-Smythe had not been in Newport for more than a few days when he received a furious phone call from his boss at Abercrombie and Fitch. "Chumley-Smythe," shouted the boss, "what the hell is going on here? A truck arrives every hour on the hour with ribbon. Our storage bins are filled with ribbon all the way up to the fifteenth floor, and more keeps arriving. The story is that you have ordered it." Chumley-Smythe choked. "I'll be right back, boss, and get to the bottom of this." ISAAC ASIMOV Back in his office, he called in Moishe Ginsberg and, waving his fists, shouted, "Listen, you bastard, what the hell do you mean sending in all these ribbons? Are you crazy?" Ginsberg's eyebrows lifted. He said, "I beg your pardon, but I have your order blank right here. I'll show it to you, but don't try to snatch it and tear it up because it is only a Xerox. I have the original in a safe-deposit box. You see it says you want a length of ribbon equal to the distance from the tip of my nose to the tip of my pecker?" "Yes, and that's all I wanted." "And that's all you're getting. The tip of my nose is right here, but the tip of my pecker is in Poland." I was told this joke in a synagogue when I was attending the bar mitzvah of a young man, and it was told me by the young man's father. He led me carefully from one room in the synagogue to another in order to tell me the joke. It was my notion he had taken me from a more holy room to a less holy room where God might not overhear this story—which was most unsuitable for a synagogue. Now for the other Moishe Ginsberg joke. He is still a salesman, but there is otherwise no connection with the previous story.

Articles · Jan 2026

Stephen V. Faraone · 1 highlight

“People with ADHD are at increased risk for obesity, asthma, allergies, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, sleep problems, psoriasis, epilepsy, sexually transmitted infections, abnormalities of the eye, immune disorders, and metabolic disorders.”

Books · Jan 2026

Levine, Noah · 1 highlight

A refuge is a safe place, a place of protection—a place that we go to in times of need, a shelter. We are always taking refuge in something. Drugs, alcohol, food, sex, money, or relationships with people have been a refuge for many of us. Before addiction, such refuges provide temporary feelings of comfort and safety. But at some point we crossed the line into addiction. And the substances or behaviors that were once a refuge inevitably became a dark and lonely repetitive cycle of searching for comfort as we wandered through an empty life.

Articles · Jan 2026

Shapiro, S. · 2 highlights

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Like mathematics, logic has also been a central focus of philosophy, almost from the very beginning. Aristotle is still listed among the four or five most influential logicians ever, and logic received attention throughout the ancient and medieval intellectual worlds. Today, of course, logic is a thriving branch of both mathematics and philosophy.

Articles · Dec 2025

Chris Gethard · 22 highlights

It is never the audience’s fault. Never. There is no type of comedy that sucks. Only shitty versions of it. All types are shitty sometimes.

It is weak to have points with no premise. It is cowardly to have premises but never have a point.

The best stand ups are the ones who can go into any environment and figure it out. Alt, club, college, festival, rock show, etc

Tweets · Dec 2025

Hasan Toor · 1 highlight

Top engineers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google don't prompt like you do. They use 10 techniques that turn mediocre outputs into production-grade results. I spent 2 weeks reverse-engineering their methods. Here's what actually works (steal the prompts + techniques) 👇  * Technique 1: Constraint-Based Prompting Most prompts are too open-ended. Engineers add hard constraints that force the model into a narrower solution space, eliminating 80% of bad outputs before they happen. Template: Generate [output] with these non-negotiable constraints: - Must include: [requirement 1], [requirement 2] - Must avoid: [restriction 1], [restriction 2] - Format: [exact structure] - Length: [specific range] Example: Generate a product description for wireless headphones with these constraints: - Must include: battery life in hours, noise cancellation rating, weight - Must avoid: marketing fluff, comparisons to competitors, subjective claims - Format: 3 bullet points followed by 1 sentence summary - Length: 50-75 words total  * Technique 2: Multi-Shot with Failure Cases Everyone uses examples. Engineers show the model what NOT to do. This creates boundaries that few-shot alone can't establish. Template: Task: [what you want] Good example: [correct output] Bad example: [incorrect output] Reason it fails: [specific explanation] Now do this: [your actual request] Example: Task: Write a technical explanation of API rate limiting Good example: "Rate limiting restricts clients to 100 requests per minute by tracking request timestamps in Redis. When exceeded, the server returns 429 status." Bad example: "Rate limiting is when you limit the rate of something to make sure nobody uses too much." Reason it fails: Too vague, no technical specifics, doesn't explain implementation Now explain database indexing.  * Technique 3: Metacognitive Scaffolding Instead of asking for an answer, engineers ask the model to explain its reasoning process BEFORE generating. This catches logical errors at the planning stage. Template: Before you [generate output], first: 1. List 3 assumptions you're making 2. Identify potential edge cases 3. Explain your approach in 2 sentences Then provide [the actual output]. Example: Before you write a regex pattern to validate email addresses, first: 1. List 3 assumptions you're making about valid email formats 2. Identify potential edge cases (unusual domains, special characters, etc.) 3. Explain your approach in 2 sentences Then provide the regex pattern with inline comments.  * Technique 4: Differential Prompting Engineers don't ask for one output. They ask for two versions optimized for different criteria, then pick or merge. This exploits the model's ability to hold multiple solution strategies. Template: Generate two versions of [output]: Version A: Optimized for [criterion 1] Version B: Optimized for [criterion 2] For each, explain the tradeoffs you made. Example: Generate two versions of a function that finds duplicates in an array: Version A: Optimized for speed (assume memory isn't a constraint) Version B: Optimized for memory efficiency (assume large datasets) For each, explain the tradeoffs you made and provide time/space complexity. Your browser does not support the video tag. * Technique 5: Specification-Driven Generation Engineers write a spec first, get model agreement, THEN generate. This separates "what to build" from "how to build it" and catches misalignment early. Template: First, write a specification for [task] including: - Inputs and their types - Expected outputs and format - Key constraints or requirements - Edge cases to handle Ask me to approve before implementing. Example: First, write a specification for a password validation function including: - Inputs and their types (what does the function accept?) - Expected outputs and format (boolean? error messages?) - Key constraints (min length, required characters, etc.) - Edge cases to handle (empty strings, unicode, spaces) Ask me to approve before implementing. * Technique 6: Chain-of-Verification The model generates an answer, then immediately verifies it against stated requirements. Self-correction catches 60%+ of errors that would slip through. Template: [Your request] After generating, verify your output against these criteria: 1. [verification check 1] 2. [verification check 2] 3. [verification check 3] If any check fails, regenerate. Example: Write SQL query to find users who made purchases in the last 30 days but haven't logged in for 60 days. After generating, verify your output against these criteria: 1. Does it correctly filter by date ranges using proper date functions? 2. Does it join necessary tables and avoid cartesian products? 3. Will it handle users with no purchases without errors? If any check fails, regenerate with corrections. * Here's why these work: The pattern: these techniques all add structure AROUND the generation step. Bad prompting: "Do the thing" Engineer prompting: "Plan how you'll do the thing, do the thing, verify the thing" Models are prediction engines. Give them a better scaffold and they predict better outputs. The difference between 70% accuracy and 95% is usually prompt design, not model capability. * Every one of these techniques does the same thing: reduces ambiguity. The model isn't "thinking" less. It's thinking in a more constrained space where wrong answers are structurally impossible. You're not making it smarter. You're making it harder to be wrong. * Pick ONE technique from this thread.

Books · Nov 2025

Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. · 27 highlights

The connectome that lights up when you’re engaged in a task is called the task-positive network, or TPN. Aptly named, the TPN gets you down to work. You’re deliberately doing something and you are intent on it, unaware of much beyond the bounds of what you’re doing. In this state, you don’t consciously know whether you’re happy or not, which is just as good as being happy, if not better, because you’re not wasting any energy in self-assessment.

this other connectome is called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN allows for expansive, imaginative, and creative thinking. The back half of the DMN—called the posterior cingulate—facilitates your autobiographic memory, your personal history. This allows you to think back, draw upon, and pick apart the past. The front part, the medial prefrontal cortex, is the opposite. It enables you to look forward and to think about, imagine, and plan for the future.

The DMN and TPN are the yin and yang of your brain. Both help us and hold us back in certain ways. One isn’t better than the other. But as helpful as the DMN can be (angelic in its own right), it is also a Demon (as its initialism suggests!) for the ADHD or VAST brain because of our capacity for intractable rumination while captive in it.

Books · Oct 2025

Roy Peter Clark · 2 highlights

Never read a newspaper, magazine, or book without a pen nearby. You already “talk back” to the author and text—at least in your mind. Get in the habit of writing those thoughts in the margins of the page.

don't read this book without writing in the margins

Next time you are in a bookstore that sells used books, search to find some golden oldies in which an owner of a book (or more than one!) talks back to the author in the margins.

used books are MORE valuable when they are written in. It's like inheriting a school textbook with highlights and notes

Articles · Sep 2025

Leo Rosten · 4 highlights

‘Humour is the affectionate communication of insight.’ I wrote this definition almost thirty years ago. It did not, so far as I know, cause wild cheering in the streets. I quote it now because I cannot improve upon it. I also said that humour is ‘the chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets, journalists for one humorist.’*

The funny story is a matchless teaching device. (The rabbis of old, in the Talmud, instruct a teacher always to begin a lesson with something amusing.) What better way is there to convey the commanding influence of ‘context,’ say, than in the marvellous anecdote about the artist and the model he is painting in the nude (page 30)? What more vivid way is there of describing paranoia than with the tale of the man who complains to the psychiatrist that for reasons he simply cannot understand people regard him as crazy (page 272)?

I hope you are not foolish enough to consider humour insignificant and dismiss jokes as ‘trivia’. The laughter of a people can be as illuminating as its patterns of pride, guilt and shame. | think humour is an isotope that locates the values of a culture. The japery of a nation runs up and down the scale of its scorn and its admiration, its approval or contempt.

My jokes are representative of my culture as a Jewish private school graduate, an acrobat, an ADHD man with allergies

Articles · Sep 2025

January Nelson · 7 highlights

“I eat swiss cheese from the inside out.” – Steven Wright

“I had amnesia once or twice.” – Steven Wright

The judge asked, “What do you plead?” I said, “Insanity, your honor, who in their right mind would park in the passing lane?” – Steven Wright

Articles · Jul 2025

Paul Graham · 2 highlights

The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge.

I wonder about how in comedy a lot of of us are frustrated with certain bits or we think about the gaps in you know developing talent And people have created schools mostly as a mean of supporting themselves in to a degree they do work but then there’s also a gap in that group of students were some people also get left behind

Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.

Articles · Jul 2025

Paul Graham · 4 highlights

Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write.

A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by [writing](http://paulgraham.com/words.html).

You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things. [[2](http://paulgraham.com/read.html?s=09#f2n)] People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can't afford to.

Books · Jul 2025

Alderton, Dolly · 7 highlights

‘Andy!’ he shouts from the window as he rolls it down. ‘Remember: a broken heart is a jester’s greatest prop.’ I smile defeatedly. ‘You’ve been handed a clown wig and collar. You could get some of your best work out of this.’

‘She makes a fine home for a free man,’ he declares. ‘Cheers, Bob,’ I say. ‘Come aboard, I’ll show you all her nooks and crannies.’ I make a decision in that moment to never, ever gender the boat.

But I’m not a member of that club any more. No one is. It’s been disbanded, dissolved, the domain is no longer valid. So what do I do with all its stuff? Where do I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now I’m no longer in a tribe of two? And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird? Why do I find this so hard?

Books · Jan 2025

Gene Perret · 1 highlight


Supplementals · Jan 2025

Kliph Nesteroff · 10 highlights

Twitter was the perfect medium for the short-form joke. Being limited to 140 characters instilled a joke-writing discipline and gave a comedian a platform on which to test jokes instantaneously. If a Twitter feed hit the right nerve, it could boost a comedian’s career.

Budd Friedman’s Improv was initially a folk music venue in 1963.

The phrase “working blue” came into usage at the time. If a representative of the Keith Orpheum circuit objected to the content of an act, a request to cut the material was sent backstage in a blue envelope.

Supplementals · Jan 2025

Moshe Kasher · 9 highlights

The great irony of the addict is that the thing he takes, which is the only thing that has ever made life feel good, stops working long before he considers the possibility of life without it.

As you go back through the creaky secret rooms of your memory, you find places damaged by time and neglect. You can dust them off, but often you want to present them in a form that is understandable to people, and I can imagine polishing a corroded memory and making it prettier or more compelling than it deserves to be.

Why that day was any different, I don’t know. There comes a time. The pain of existence transcends the fear of change. There comes a time.

Supplementals · Jan 2025

Sally Holloway · 10 highlights

You take a word or phrase apart, pun on one or both halves of it, and then redefine it. In that way, it doesn’t seem as simple as a pun.

The clever bit comes in thinking things through, applying your new meanings back to the main subject and turning them into joke ideas. How far and which paths you go down is up to you. Just follow your intuition. Remember the key is to keep applying the new meaning back to the previous levels.

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation for when you come back to your work your judgement will be surer.

Supplementals · Jan 2025

Jesse David Fox · 30 highlights

If you are saying supposedly offensive things and the audience is instantly all on board, it is not a comedy show, it’s a rally.

As Will Rogers once said, “An onion can make people cry, but there’s never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh.”

Unlike a traditional sitcom, which might have to figure out how to make the show 100 percent funny, Atlanta and shows like it are free to see if they can make the funny and terrifying and very sad exist all at the same time.

Supplementals · Jan 2025

Scott Dikkers · 10 highlights

The reason most writers fall short is they don’t brainstorm enough joke-beat ideas, so they don’t create the quantity necessary to achieve the quality readers demand.

Your writing must play it straight (but still exist firmly within your comedy world), and never wink or smirk at the audience. Act as if you have no awareness the piece is the least bit funny.

Once you’ve selected the idea, you’ll make a bullet-point list of additional jokes stemming from your core concept. You’ll want a list of at least 20 additional jokes that flesh out the comedy world of your joke.

Supplementals · Jan 2025

Blake Crouch · 10 highlights

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar—when the city sleeps but you don’t, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

Supplementals · Jan 2025

Blake Crouch · 10 highlights

We’re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.

“When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It’s almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned.”

It’s the beautiful thing about youth. There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

Supplementals · Jan 2025

Mel Brooks · 10 highlights

Comedy is a very powerful component of life. It has the most to say about the human condition because if you laugh you can get by. You can struggle when things are bad if you have a sense of humor. Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye. It’s a defense against unhappiness and depression.

Failure is vital. It is an incredibly important quotient in the equation of a career. After you wipe away your tears, it’s not a bad experience and under the right circumstances it will make you better, both as a person and as an artist.

Carl once said, “A brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to behold.”

Articles · Dec 2024

David Nirenberg · 2 highlights

The answer I propose is that this has to do with the extraordinary place of Judaism in the history of critical thought itself: Because critical thought in the Western tradition has so often imagined itself as an overcoming of Judaism, it has the capacity to introduce Judaism in whatever it criticizes.

So let me pose as explicitly as possible a question that worries me. Could the many people of good will in the world today, each of us trying to improve that world, not worsen it, be caught in a similar moment as Hanna Arendt? Are we living through a moment in which anti-Judaism is increasingly widespread, becoming acceptable as a language of critique across many parts of the political spectrum, yet we are collectively unable or unwilling to detect and name the danger, precisely because the anti-semitism of today presents itself (as it often has in the past) as a critique of realities of unjust power in the present?

Books · Nov 2024

Jarod Anderson · 1 highlight

OUR CRAFT People make meaning like bees make honey. Gathering experiences and images, synthesizing them into something new, rich, uniquely ours. Respect the meaning you make, the family you choose, the wisdom you craft, sweet and golden on your tongue.

Books · Nov 2024

Blake Crouch · 2 highlights

arrival. Her people didn’t just object to Slade’s new directive to “put people in a deprivation tank and stop their heart.” With the exception of her and Sergei, they resigned en masse and demanded to be returned to the mainland immediately. Whenever she feels guilty for staying, she thinks of her mom and others like her, but it’s a small consolation. Besides, she’s pretty sure Slade wouldn’t let her leave regardless. Jee-woon has flown inland to find personnel for the medical team and new engineers to build the deprivation tank, leaving Helena alone on the rig with Slade and a skeleton crew. Out here on the platform, it’s like the world is screaming in her ear. Lifting her face to the sky, she screams back. Day 598 Someone is knocking at her door. Reaching out in the darkness, she turns on the lamp and climbs out of bed in pajama bottoms and a black tank top. The alarm clock on her desk shows 9:50 a.m. She moves into the living room and toward the door, hitting the button on the wall to raise the blackout curtains. Slade is standing in the corridor in jeans and a hoodie—first time she’s laid eyes on him in weeks. He says, “Shit, I woke you.” She squints at him under the glare of the light panels in the ceiling. “Mind if I come in?” he asks. “Do I have a choice?” “Please, Helena.” She takes a step back and lets him enter, following him down the short entryway, past the powder room, and into the main living space. “What do you want?” she asks. He takes a seat on the ottoman of an oversize chair, beside the windows that look out into a world of infinite sea. He says, “They tell me you aren’t eating or exercising. That you haven’t spoken to anyone or gone outside in days.” “Why won’t you let me talk to my parents? Why won’t you let me leave?” “You aren’t well, Helena. You’re in no state of mind to protect the secrecy of this place.” “I told you I wanted out. My mom’s in a facility. I don’t know how she’s doing. My dad hasn’t heard my voice in a month. I’m sure he’s worried—” “I know you can’t see it right now, but I am saving you from yourself.” “Oh, fuck you.” “You checked out, because you disagreed with the direction I was taking this project. All I’ve been doing is giving you time to reconsider throwing everything away.” “It was my project.” “It’s my money.” Her hands tremble. With fear. With rage. She says, “I don’t want to do this anymore. You have ruined my dream. You have blocked me from trying to help my mom and others. I want to go home. Are you going to continue keeping me here against my will?” “Of course not.” “So I can leave?” “Do you remember what I asked you the first day you got here?” She shakes her head, tears coming. “I asked if you wanted to change the world with me. We are standing on the shoulders of all the brilliant work you’ve done, and I came here this morning to tell you that we’re almost there. Forget everything that’s happened in the past. Let’s cross the finish line together.” She stares at him across the coffee table, tears gliding down her face. “What are you feeling?” he asks. “Talk to me.” “Like you stole this thing away from me.” “Nothing could be further from the truth. I stepped in when your vision flagged. That’s what partners do. Today is the biggest day of my life and yours. It’s everything we’ve been working toward. That’s why I came up here. The deprivation tank is ready. The reactivation apparatus has been retrofitted to work inside. We’re running a new test in ten minutes, and this is the big one.” “Who’s the test subject?” “It doesn’t matter.” “It does to me.” “Just a guy getting paid twenty grand a week to make the ultimate sacrifice for science.” “And you told him how dangerous this research is?” “He’s fully aware of the risks. Look, if you want to go home, pack your bags and be at the helipad at noon.” “What about my contract?” “You promised me three years. You’ll be in breach. You’ll forfeit your compensation, profit participation, everything. You knew the ground rules going in. But if you want to finish what we started, come down to the lab with me right now. It’s going to be a day for the record books.” BARRYNovember 6, 2018 Strapped into a chair in a waking nightmare, Barry says, “It was October twenty-fifth. Eleven years ago.” “What’s the first thing you remember when you think of it?” the man asks. “The most potent image or feeling?” Barry is caught in the strangest juxtaposition of emotion. He wants to break this man in half, but the thought of Meghan that night is on the verge of breaking him. He answers in monotone, “Finding her body.” “I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. Not after she was gone. Before.” “The last time I spoke to her.” “That’s what I want you to talk about.” Barry stares across the room, gritting his teeth. “Please continue, Detective Sutton.” “I’m sitting in my chair in my living room, watching the World Series.” “Do you remember who was playing?” “Red Sox and Rockies. Game two. The Sox had won the first game. They would take the series in four straight.” “Who were you rooting for?” “I didn’t really care. I guess I wanted to see the Rockies tie it up, keep the series interesting. Why are you doing this to me? What purpose does—” “So you’re sitting in your chair . . .” “I’m probably drinking a beer.” “Would Julia have been watching with you?” Jesus. He knows her name. “No. I think she was watching TV in our bedroom. We’d already eaten dinner.” “As a family?” “I don’t remember. Probably.” Barry is suddenly aware of a pressure in his chest, the intensity of which is nearly crushing. He says, “I haven’t talked about that night in years.” The man just sits there on his stool, running his fingers through his beard and coolly studying him, waiting for Barry to push on. “I see Meghan coming out of the hallway. I don’t remember for sure what she was wearing, but for some reason, I see her in this pair of jeans and a turquoise sweater she always wore.” “How old is your daughter?” “Ten days shy of sixteen. And she stops in front of the coffee table—I know this happened for sure—and she’s standing between me and the television with her hands on her hips and this quasi-severe look on her face.” Tears fill in at the edges of his eyes. “It’s still incredibly emotional for you,” the man says. “This is good.” “Please,” Barry says. “Don’t make me do this.” “Continue.” Barry takes a breath, blindly groping for some handhold of emotional balance. He says finally, “It was the last time I would look into my daughter’s eyes. And I didn’t know it. I kept trying to look around her to see the television.” He doesn’t want to cry in front of this man. Jesus, anything but that. “Continue.” “She asked if she could go to DQ. She usually went there a couple of nights a week to do her homework, hang out with friends. I went through the standard questioning. Did your mother say it was OK? No, she had come to me instead. Is your homework finished? No, but part of the reason she wanted to go was to meet up with Mindy, her lab partner in biology, to discuss a project they were working on. Who else was going to be there? A list of names, most of which I knew. I remember checking my watch—it was eight thirty and still in the early innings of the game—and I told her she could go, but that I wanted her home no later than ten. She made her arguments for eleven. I said, ‘No, it’s a school night, you know your curfew,’ and then she let it go and headed for the door. “I remember calling out to her just before she left, telling her I loved her.” Tears release, his body shaking with emotion, but the straps hold him tight against the chair. Barry says, “The truth is, I don’t know if I called out to her. I think probably I didn’t, that I simply went back to watching the game and didn’t think of her again until ten p.m. had come and gone, and I wondered why she wasn’t home yet.” The man says, “Computer, stop session.” And then: “Thank you, Barry.” He leans forward and wipes the tears from Barry’s face with the back of his hand. “What was the point of all that?” Barry asks, broken. “That was worse than any physical torture.”

This was hands down the hardest book I’ve ever written, and I leaned more on friends than ever before when it came time to gather feedback. To say thank you to those priceless people who provided notes on Recursion, and to pay tribute to other friends and writers I greatly admire, some of their namesakes appear in the book

Books · Nov 2024

David Foster Wallace · 2 highlights

MY APPEARANCE

He argued that I shouldn't have a Xanax, though, and I agreed.

Articles · Nov 2024

Philippe Gaulier · 1 highlight

To avoid being boring, you have to have a smile in your eyes, even laughter in your eyes. That means your eyes are having fun.

Articles · Nov 2024

peta LiLY · 9 highlights

What is Fixed Point? This post is about Fixed Point as I learned it from Gaulier and [Monika Pagneux](http://totaltheatre.org.uk/archive/features/monika-pagneux) in a church hall just north of the Talgarth Road many years ago. Fixed Point is the capturing of the body/being in a physical attitude in space and the sustaining of that enlivened shape for theatrical and comedic impact.

Exercise The Fixed Point is arrived at by getting the player engaged in full-bodied physical movement and then calling ‘stop’ or ‘halt’ at a random moment. The player is instructed to avoid responding to the ‘stop’ instruction by completely dropping what they were doing and assuming a standing position. The idea is rather to arrest the movement of the player, like a single frame in a piece of film.

Fixed Point is a great way to train the stamina to sustain – to  keep the dynamics alive and to avoid drooping in shape or energy. Fixed Point is not about perfunctorily holding a shape - it is about feeling and relishing the life  in that captured moment.

Books · Oct 2024

Bloom, Adam · 15 highlights

Whenever I watch comedy that’s neither succinct nor crammed with detail, I feel that the comedian is ripping their audience off. I’d say that the most useful exercise I’ve ever done when it comes to trimming down a joke is tweeting jokes on X, back when it was known as Twitter, back when a tweet was limited to 140 characters.

“What’s the point you want to make?”

asking yourself exactly what you’re trying to say is an extremely useful tool for making a joke clearer. Don’t forget to then trim it down if it needs trimming down, and then make sure that it’s still clear.

Books · Oct 2024

steve north · 17 highlights

A comedian and a comic are two completely different animals. A comic says funny things or makes funny observations. A comedian is a funny person who says funny things.

In comedy, empathy is okay, but sympathy is not. Sympathy kills laughter every time. If you feel sorry for someone, you’re not going to laugh at him or her. Absurd people, on the other hand, don’t evoke sympathy. You really don’t feel sorry for them. You feel like they don’t really get what’s wrong with themselves. They’re just out of control. There’s no hope for them. We empathize with them, but we don’t sympathize with them. We dismiss them as absurd, which allows us to laugh at them.

understand this one very important premise: you are not doing you on stage; you are doing a fictional character based on truths about you.

Articles · Sep 2024

wikisource.org · 2 highlights

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, —that is genius.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

Books · Sep 2024

Gary Gulman · 19 highlights

45) Don’t worry about “burning” material on a special or album. Hoarding jokes may signal your brain that you’re out of ideas. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” - Maya Angelou

7) Find a comic friend to call/meet and go over jokes/premises/ideas. Play “Is This Funny?” Be honest but gentle & DON’T JUST WAIT UNTIL ITS YOUR TURN! Tell them if you’ve heard similar bits! 2 people is best more is ok. It’s one of the most fun and helpful exercises. Even if your partner just gives you more confidence in a new joke/idea, it is INVALUABLE. A lot of times they will suggest excellent tags (additions to the joke usually but not limited to the punchline) or different angles. It also gives you a safe place to say things out loud. You can generally disregard the first idea that pops into your head because it probably popped into many other heads too. Obvious punchlines are promiscuous. Don’t be like the millionaire standup I heard about who used to run all his ideas and suddenly have to leave when it was his turn to listen and help. Don’t feel like you have to be ALL BUSINESS and write the whole time. The best part of comedy is the friendships. Sometimes you just need someone to whine about club to. But, put a time limit on that too.

8) When trying out new jokes you have to be PREPARED. Start with a few proven jokes to make sure the crowd is receptive and so you can get a gauge on the volume of the laughter. Make sure you have a good one loaded to follow the new one in case it dies “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” - Saint John Wooden UCLA Basketball Coach Philosopher Humanitarian. “It’s ok to fail! Fail a lot!!! But don’t fail because you were being lazy.” - Me 99% of the comedians I love are going over notes before they get on stage. That’s not a coincidence.

Articles · Sep 2024

Gary Gulman · 165 highlights

Tip No. 1: Record Every Set Record every set. The hard part: Listen to it, and transcribe everything you want to say again. It’s sometimes depressing, but it gets you to do the hardest part, which is to sit down and write. Usually you’ll think of something to add or change. This works for me. As good as you think your memory is, you frequently forget key components of your jokes or strong ad-libs. This is especially helpful early on in your career, when you’re trying to build time. Gary’s thoughts on [Tip No. 1](https://twitter.com/GaryGulman/status/1080146484048347138): If I could only give one tip to improve at comedy, it would be this. It will make you better in so many ways, and keep you feeling like you’re working hard.

[Tip No. 2](https://twitter.com/garygulman/status/1080507341638955009?lang=en): Write out a favorite joke word-for-word one sentence at a time. After completing each sentence, analyze each word. Why does it work? How do the syllables of the words create rhythm? How do the sentences build to the punchline? What’s the grammar of comedy? You can do [Tip No. 2] at any stage, but probably it’s best early on in your career. If it sounds daunting to write out entire jokes, you should know that the immortal Hunter S. Thompson transcribed The Great Gatsby word-for-“w-o-r-d.”

[Tip No. 5](https://twitter.com/GaryGulman/status/1081607902513819649): Mark Twain said, and I’m paraphrasing, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” You’ve been meaning to do this. Go through your jokes and add some lightning today.

Articles · Sep 2024

The Economist · 10 highlights

Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun.

Just like me. Easy and fun to destabilize marriages.

Today roughly 350m people around the world have a dating app on their phone, up from 250m in 2018, according to Business of Apps, a research firm.

350 million people suing something imperfect That’s the amount of people in America Imagine everyone in America used duolingo?

All this helps explain why dating-app developers are struggling to convince users to part with cash

Meanwhile, woman on dating apps have no trouble getting men to part with cash.

Supplementals · Sep 2024

Josh Peck · 10 highlights

“Find the people who support you to be what you want to be, who push you to be your very best, and if you find yourself in a room with someone who doesn’t make you feel that way, leave immediately.”

Funny thing about taking your life into your own hands, though, is once you have it, there’s no one to blame. It’s now solely your responsibility to make something happen and if it all falls apart, well, that’s on you. And that’s exactly what happened, when I set my life on fire.

Anger is about the quiet, seething judgment of everyone and everything. You become the self-appointed arbiter of all that is right and wrong in the world and if people would only act the way you thought they should, life would be infinitely better.

Supplementals · Sep 2024

Kenneth Brower and Neal Stephenson · 10 highlights

Technology forges on, not from any need of the species, but from the need of certain of its more brilliant members for interesting games to play.

Dyson and Taylor planned to be on Mars by 1964, on Saturn by 1970.

He is a principal architect of the theory of quantum electrodynamics.

Supplementals · Sep 2024

Mike Thomas · 4 highlights

Phil even took up gardening. “Really, it’s a wonderful thing, just as an allegorical representation of life,” he told writer David Rensin in 1991. “How, if you put something in the proper soil, it does so much better.” To Phil, good gardening was “a metaphor for proper planning and doing things right. Paying attention to detail.”

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of Earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction. —Bessie Anderson Stanley, “Success”

JULIA SWEENEY: The day he died, I felt a lot of compassion for [Brynn]. Because I had just gotten out of a relationship a couple of years before that with a very passive guy who was making me crazy with his passivity. And I could see how someone [like that] could make you go crazy. And I don’t even do drugs. I can only imagine how I would be if I was also doing drugs. That doesn’t make it right, but [it’s like], “Say something to me! Why aren’t you talking to me? Don’t look down! Or just say what you’re thinking about right now! Just talk to me. But don’t shut down when I’m upset.”

Supplementals · Sep 2024

ALAN MOORE · 1 highlight

We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.

Books · Sep 2024

Sally Holloway · 75 highlights

When I started working on a subject I would always worry that there would be no jokes on it. The way to overcome this was to focus on my belief (that I now teach) that jokes are not genius thunderbolts, they already exist in the ether, and all I had to do was keep looking for them.

Jokes exist in the ether; It's okay if you don't see them right away, that just means you live in reality.

I learnt to realize it was a mid-afternoon slump, to put the feelings to one side and keep working.

my third discovery: no matter how much I thought I’d run out of ideas on a subject, if left it by taking a break or visiting another subject, when I returned to it my brain would have new ideas. I started to think of this as background processing – the same mechanism that a computer uses when you set it to print or search.

Books · Aug 2024

Bruce Lee · 22 highlights

Bruce Lee rejected blind obedience to external authority. He urged human beings to hold themselves and their lives as their highest values and wrote in praise of "the artist of life" who lives by his own judgment and who is willing to stand alone against tradition and popular opinion.

Flow in the process of life. - You can never step in the same water twice, my friend. Like flowing water, life is perpetual movement. There is nothing fixed. Whatever your problems happen to be in the future, remember well that they cannot remain stationary but must move together with your living spirit. Otherwise, you will drift into artificiality or attempt to solidify the ever-flowing. To avoid that, you must change and be flexible. Remember, the usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.

Life simply is. - Living exists when life lives through us - unhampered in its flow, for he who is living is not conscious of living and, in this, is the life it lives. Life lives; and in the living flow, no questions are raised. The reason is that life is a living now! So, in order to live life whole-heartedly, the answer is life simply is.

Books · Jul 2024

Rick Rubin · 5 highlights

The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable. Robert Henri

What you make doesn’t have to be witnessed, recorded, sold, or encased in glass for it to be a work of art. Through the ordinary state of being, we’re already creators in the most profound way, creating our experience of reality and composing the world we perceive.

Comedians live funnier lives

To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention. Refining our sensitivity to tune in to the more subtle notes. Looking for what draws us in and what pushes us away. Noticing what feeling tones arise and where they lead.

Books · Jul 2024

Austin Kleon · 3 highlights

what makes for great attribution? Attribution is all about providing context for what you’re sharing: what the work is, who made it, how they made it, when and where it was made, why you’re sharing it, why people should care about it, and where people can see some more work like it. Attribution is about putting little museum labels next to the stuff you share.

Most story structures can be traced back to myths and fairy tales. Emma Coats, a former storyboard artist at Pixar, outlined the basic structure of a fairy tale as a kind of Mad Lib that you can fill in with your own elements: “Once upon a time, there was _____. Every day, _____. One day, _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, _____. Until finally, _____.” Pick your favorite story and try to fill in the blanks. It’s striking how often it works.

George Orwell wrote: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”

Books · Jul 2024

Ian Kerner, Ph.D. · 2 highlights

“You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how.” —Clark Gable,

Although I have a Ph.D. in clinical sexology, this book is principally written from a practitioner’s perspective

Articles · Apr 2024

static1.squarespace.com · 6 highlights

ly

How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

Articles · Mar 2024

Matt Ruby · 1 highlight

A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn't ask himself what's in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for. ... Want to avoid being a hack? Then answer these questions: • What do you yourself want to write? • What do you think is important? • \What’s the best part of yourself? • What do you really feel or believe? • What do you think is interesting? • What would you make if you weren’t worried at all about whether it will sell or not?

Books · Mar 2024

Colin Jost · 2 highlights

Where you grew up becomes a big part of who you are for the rest of your life. You can’t run away from that. Well, sometimes the running away from it is what makes you who you are.” —HELEN MIRREN

I’m from monsey. Where high school dropouts get their ged and start working for cash advance. And running away is necessary

After the very first show I ever did on the road—the 7 P.M. Thursday show, where I did eight minutes of stand-up to scattered laughter—I was waiting outside the club when two extremely pretty girls walked out and said, “Weren’t you just onstage?” I said, “Yes…” Then they linked arms with me and asked, “Where to?” Sensing I might never have this opportunity again, I said, “I don’t know…my hotel room?” They said: “Let’s do it.” Fort Lauderdale, baby! Now, I am not one to discuss my love life, even with friends, but I needed to share that story with you because: (a) It was the most insane thing that could ever happen after your first show on the road. And (b) because fifteen years later, it has never happened again.

Articles · Mar 2024

Scott Dikkers · 1 highlight

The act of creativity needs a straight person. It needs an opposing force to ground it and put up a framework—that is, if it ever hopes to produce anything tangible. For creativity, that straight person is the order we impose on it: parameters, limits, outlines, structure, and discipline. The best creations are done on deadline, with constraints, and with the crack of one’s own whip. For a genie to work, it has to be in a bottle once in a while.

The moral of the story is: Don't forget you are also the editor!

Books · Mar 2024

Simon Rich · 25 highlights

> Then Abraham tied Isaac up and laid him on the altar over the wood. And Abraham took the knife and lifted it up to kill his son as a sacrifice to the LORD. At that moment the angel of the LORD shouted to him from heaven, “Abraham! Lay down the knife.” … Then they returned to Beersheba. > —GENESIS 22 the ride back to beersheba How about some ice cream, Isaac? No? Are you sure? I’ll tell you what, I’ll get us some ice cream. Want some ice cream? I’ll get us some ice cream.

The premise here is simple: what was the ride back to beer Sheba like after Abraham was Bout to kill his son. That overarching theme influences the specifics, like how guilty Abraham is and we get to think about how guilty parents would act Pretty much the entire dialogue stems from the fact that Abraham is guilty and nervous. So he: Tries spoiling his son Mentioning not to tell his mother More bribes Lots of compliments Weird justifications

a conversation at the grown-ups’ table as imagined at the kids’ table MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy. DAD: Okay. GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry. DAD: Me too. When it was over, I had sex. UNCLE: I’m having sex right now. DAD: We all are. MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best. DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won’t tell. MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell. FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what? My voice is pretty loud! DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t. MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden! DAD: I’m angry too! We’re angry at each other! MOM: Now everything is fine. DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good. MOM: There was a big sex. FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest! (Everybody laughs.) MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy! GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like? ALL: Yes. GRANDFATHER: Don’t tell the kids.

This premise is exactly the title. How do kids think about what adults talk about We can also do this by trying to figure out how babies might think about this Or how elderly people think about adult Or about how scam artists feel in church after the Eucharist

day at UNICEF headquarters as i imagined it in third grade

Justifications a 3rd grader might use to keep the money he was supposed to collect for unicef

Books · Mar 2024

Wes "Scoop" Nisker · 14 highlights

If you want to make apple pie from scratch, first you have to make a universe.”             —CARL SAGAN Hello human. If you can understand these words then that’s probably what you are

Sometimes I go around pitying myself, when all the while I am being carried on the great wind across the sky.”             —OJIBWAY SAYING

Where do we come from and where are we going? Do you believe you have an eternal soul or do you just get this brief fling on planet earth? What is the story you tell yourself about yourself?

Supplementals · Mar 2024

Eric Schmidt · 20 highlights

The primary objective of any business today must be to increase the speed of the product development process and the quality of its output.

Once you identify the people who have the biggest impact, give them more to do. When you pile more responsibility on your best people, trust that they will keep taking it on or tell you when enough is enough. As the old saying goes: If you want something done, give it to a busy person.

Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed.

Supplementals · Mar 2024

Tina Fey · 10 highlights

How can I give her what Don Fey gave me? The gift of anxiety. The fear of getting in trouble. The knowledge that while you are loved, you are not above the law. The Worldwide Parental Anxiety System is failing if this many of us have made sex tapes.

I have a suspicion—and hear me out, ’cause this is a rough one—I have a suspicion that the definition of “crazy” in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.

It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.

Supplementals · Mar 2024

Scott Dikkers · 10 highlights

The second exercise: Always keep a little notebook with you. Write down every idea you have, especially ones you find amusing.

IRONY SUMMARY: WHAT IT IS: Extreme Opposites HOW TO USE IT: Write the polar opposite of your Subtext.

ANALOGY SUMMARY: WHAT IT IS: The comparing of two disparate things and finding as many comparisons as possible. HOW TO USE IT: Keep one of the two parts of the Analogy “behind the curtain,” while the other is laid bare. Every time you make a connection between the two that the reader recognizes, that’s a joke.

Supplementals · Mar 2024

Judy Carter · 20 highlights

A premise is also called an opinion, a hit, a slant, a spin, a point of view. The premise must clearly and precisely answer the question of the attitude+topic. It’s usually more insightful than funny.

When adding an act-out to a joke, the rule of thumb is that first someone says something and then the other person (usually you) answers with a snappy, unexpected retort.

The best way to write killer material, the kind that will rock a room and threaten to create hernias from laughing too hard, is to capture and expand upon spontaneous moments. That means that you want to create material when you are in the funny zone.

Supplementals · Mar 2024

Albert-László Barabási · 10 highlights

But when I talk about success being collective and not individual, requiring a community’s response, I mean that we need to be able to observe the ripple of impact your performance has on the people and environments you move within. We need to see how your performance matters to us.

Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.

The most successful among us have mastered our networks, using them to achieve a place in the collective consciousness, snapping up valuable real estate in the brains of unlikely people.

Books · Mar 2024

Getty, J. Paul (Jean Paul), 1892-1976 · 1 highlight

Then, as I—and so many other successful businessmen of my acquaintance—have so frequently noted, many young people today enter upon business careers without sufficient grounding and preparation. By this, I do not mean that they lack specialized training. Rather, it is that they fail to grasp the over-all, the long-range picture. They do not understand and appreciate the universally applicable fundamentals, the basic philosophies, the endless implications and ramifications —and particularly the numberless responsibilities—which are the absolute essentials of business in this complex age.

Business young bloods 🧑‍💼 Specialized, but not deep 🤷‍♂️ Missing fundamentals 🤔

Articles · Feb 2024

youtubetranscript.com · 1 highlight

[of ideas here and then finally and this](javascript:;) [is the most](javascript:;) [important the executive system has a](javascript:;) [limited fuel tank and you can spend it](javascript:;) [out real quick every time you use an](javascript:;) [executive function and you use it](javascript:;) [continuously you empty the](javascript:;) [tank and if you get to the bottom of the](javascript:;) [tank in the next situation you will have](javascript:;) [no self-control this is the ADHD child](javascript:;)

Articles · Feb 2024

admin · 1 highlight

Ever been in church: “Hey, when’s this fucker going to wrap it up? We got kick off! Why does God hate football season? I wish he was arrested on a Wednesday. It’s so hard to be a Christian in the west coast time zone. I probably shouldn’t talk about church and say fucking in the same sentence.

Articles · Feb 2024

admin · 10 highlights

I went to a baseball game last summer in a stadium and they had a huge TV in the stadium. A Jumbotron. And this guy proposed to his girlfriend using the giant TV. He put her name up there, said, “Will you marry me?” She said yes. The crowd went wild. They found the couple in the audience. I was sitting there thinking, “God, that’s so romantic. That’s so cool.” And then I remembered thinking, you know, you could also use a screen like that if you’re having trouble breaking up with somebody. Be like, “Hey, I’m gonna grab a hot dog. But you should definitely look at that screen.” That’s a smooth way out of it.

the act out at the end is funny.

Pets are animals that are not delicious. I don’t think that was by mistake. I think we probably tried to eat all of them. Like, “Okay, these don’t taste good, so we’ll give these first names and sweaters and we’ll hang out with them. And then, uh, let’s eat the rest. Let’s eat these.” [laughs] We even eat birds. I can’t believe we eat birds. How did that start? Somebody was like, “You see that flying up there? I wanna put that in my mouth. Yeah, that looks good.” “It’s covered in feathers.” “No, no, no. I’ll do some shit to it. I’ll make it good.” “What if it doesn’t taste good?” “Well, then I’ll capture it, and I’ll put it in a cage and it’ll live in my kitchen. And I’ll have it shit on old news.” I think we’re mean to birds, man. Like… I mean, turkeys, we break the wishbone. We’ve killed the bird, we’ve cooked it, and we’ve eaten it. Then we’re like, “You wanna break its fucking bones, man?” “Yeah. Yeah, let’s… let’s break its bones, man. We’ll make a wish.” “What did you wish for?” “Death to all turkeys.” It seems like there’s a fine line between having a pet and having a hostage from a different species. You go to somebody’s house, they’re like, “Close the door. He’ll get out. Close the door! He’ll get out!” Okay. What kind of relationship do you have with this dog exactly? Owner walks away, the dog’s like… [pants] “He’s not looking. Open the door, let me out. Come on. I can’t shit when I want to. Open this door! This woman put sunglasses on me last week. I’m gonna eat her when she’s sleeping if you don’t open the goddamn door right now.”

I saw a poster that said “Missing cat.” They had a picture of the cat and a whole description. Missing, huh? I think that’s from the human perspective. The cat made that poster, it would say, “Free cat. Finally.” Picture of the cat would be like… “Cat is hunter, cat gets own food, cat has no first name, don’t look for cat, fuck off, leave cat alone, fuck off.” Okay, cat, we get it. Jesus.

Articles · Feb 2024

Jared Volle · 5 highlights

> I gave my cat a bath the other day… they love it. He sat there, he enjoyed it, and  it was fun for me too. The fur would stick to my tongue, but other than that… (Steve Martin) > > Setup/Punchline: He put the cat in the bathtub vs. He licked his cat

I call the break from the assumption to the new interpretation “shifts” because the punchline shifts the original understanding of the joke. The safety of the joke comes from the first interpretation. The punchline creates a violation by changing one of the assumptions created. Conventional jokes almost always use these “shifts” to create humor.

Here’s an example from Bill Engvall. Notice what information you assume as you read through. > [Golf] So finally, on about the fifteenth tee, I hit the drive of my life… And I watch this ball just go and go and . . . kind of hit this guy in the head. And I felt bad, but he overreacted, I thought. I mean, it wasn’t like a square hit; it just kind of glanced off his head. But he goes whippin’ his car off the freeway, like “here we go!” Mr. Attitude! (Bill Engvall) > > Setup/Punchline: A person on a golf course vs. A person driving on the highway This is a “Who-Shift.” Engvall hides the true identity of the guy he hit with the ball until he reveals that wasn’t actually another golfer (or assumption), but a driver. He didn’t talk about the when, nor do we make assumptions about it. The when is entirely left out.

Articles · Feb 2024

admin · 1 highlight

It’s a good time to be alive. Great time to be a man, right? The bar is nice and low. (audience laughing) ... It’s nice. I was with a girl the other night. She said, “I don’t think we should have sex.” I was like, oh, that’s cool. And then she goes, “Wow, you’re a great guy.” (audience laughing) I was like, that’s all it takes? (audience laughing) I’m pretty sure the alternative is a felony. I don’t know if I’m a great guy, but I’ll take it.

Books · Jan 2024

Oliver Burkeman · 10 highlights

Part I

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You don’t need to believe, as Mumford sometimes seems to imply, that the invention of the clock is solely to blame for all our time-related troubles today. (And I certainly won’t be arguing for a return to the lifestyle of medieval peasants.) But a threshold had been crossed. Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask—that is, to use the same portion of time for two things at once, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the first to notice: “One thinks with a watch in one’s hand,” he complained in an 1887 essay, “even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market.” And it becomes a lot more intuitive to project your thoughts about your life into an imagined future, leaving you anxiously wondering if things will unfold as you want them to. Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed

The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not. And this, for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if” it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.

Articles · Jan 2024

Matt Ruby · 1 highlight

Whenever the comic ask the audience an open ended question and they don’t respond bc of the nebulous nature of the prompt don’t do that - also you have “the script”as a comic why don’t you just continue “I can’t believe they hesitated to answer my ‘wassup?’” HAVE A REASON HAVE A PLAN OUT TIE IT TO YOUR NEXT JOKE STOP STOP STOP HUNTING FOR CLIPS IT’S SO OBVIOUS

Articles · Jan 2024

Adam Fishman · 7 highlights

In my conversation with Darin Swanson, I thought he summed this up quite elegantly: > “The companies I have partnered with over the last 6 plus years go through cycles of product definition and decision. Transition from founder(s) / CEO leading the product strategy, to the early team leading the experiments and iterations towards product market fit (PMF), to specific roles / individuals. In rapidly growing companies this can be moving back and forth every 3-4 months as PMF ebbs and flows. Particularly if you are [going slow](https://www.saastr.com/when-you-fall-out-of-product-market-fit/), roles change, or the company grows or shrinks.These transitions can be clunky, slow, and frustrating if left to happen organically and osmotically. In an interesting and common pattern, things get slow and clunky after a growth spurt where new roles and people are added to the team without the team taking the time to codify exactly how the new people and roles are going to maximize their impact within the company and how you’ll work together.Often a company will settle into two, less than optimal states: debate everything or wait to be told.” ... The second way that companies and cultures end up in this position is through the incentive structure (or lack thereof) within a company. Jeff Dwyer: > “When people give you a list of all the reasons it can't be done and debate on all the details, it's because their connection and incentive to achieve the actual results has gotten severed someplace. We can end up in a place where we can get in trouble for doing it wrong, but don't have enough information to really do it right. So we spend more time debating how not to get in trouble.”

First, the same root cause of being disconnected from the outcome can lead to a culture of “just do what I’m told.” It’s a self-perpetuating problem; if you don’t expect engineers to be engaged in the outcome then you won’t hire people who are. The second root cause of “just do what I’m told” is related to fear of failure. If engineers are consistently blamed or called out for getting something wrong then eventually they won’t feel comfortable getting anything wrong anymore or having an opinion at all. If they just do what they’re told then that blame shifts to someone else. It’s not my fault, I was just doing what I was told.

Both Jeff and Erika called out the importance of the “Fucks Given” scale. To put it simply, when you’re mired in debate just ask everyone how much they care about the decision on a scale of 1 to 10.

Articles · Jan 2024

Aerogramme Writers' Studio · 3 highlights

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

Once upon a time there was a boy who didn’t understand love. Every day he would take another step out into the world. His knowledge expanded with every step, but so did his naïvety. One day he got lucky. On Tinder of all places. Because of that he got to experience love. And because of his naivety he was able to experience heartbreak. Because of that, he spent a lot of time alone. He spent a lot of time numbing and dwelling on the past. And because of that, he eventually started reflecting and admitting to himself that he wanted to experience love again. Finally he decided to keep moving forward.

When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

Articles · Jan 2024

readwise.io · 10 highlights

there was nothing in the brain, not a single gene, not a single region that was specifically there for reading. That's very unlike all the other processes that are actually incorporated in reading language, vision, cognition, affect ... the brain very gradually learned how to connect parts that were there for other reasons and made a new circuit that became the first underlying network for reading very simple symbols, you know, 6,000 years ago ... you make this point that reading is not one thing at all. It's many things

Where are we going to have the space and time to give that next generation the full sum of our wisdom?

We made it possible to have so much more information in a way that made it impossible or more difficult to reflect upon and develop insights upon that information. And as such we, we increased information but reduced judgment. And so as you say, we're, we're not passing on our our our best thoughts. But it's also weirdly why the information we have access to isn't creating some civilization wide betterment. Because it turned out the information was never enough. It's what we did with it, what we thought about it, the connections we made with it.

Books · Jan 2024

Seth Barrish · 12 highlights

Give yourself stuff to do onstage, and you’ll seem less stiff and more connected to the environment. P.S. Activities will also relax you.

Things I can do to connect myself to a space: - clean dishes - inspect the walls - look at myself in a mirror - clean a glass - pour a drink, take a drink - write -

Give yourself physical tasks onstage. Human beings rarely stand and do nothing. We eat, drink, wash, fiddle with objects, clean our fingernails—you name it. ... Give yourself stuff to do onstage, and you’ll seem less stiff and more connected to the environment. P.S. Activities will also relax you.

Things I can do to connect myself to a space: - clean dishes - inspect the walls - look at myself in a mirror - clean a glass - pour a drink, take a drink - write -

Remember that you can do things and talk at the same time ... Keep doing your tasks while you speak

Books · Jan 2024

Charna Halpern · 4 highlights

The truth is funny. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention. After all, we're funniest when we're just being ourselves. Sitting around relaxing with friends usually inspires far more laughter than a TV sitcom or someone trying to tell jokes. When was the last time you laughed out loud? Odds are that most of your recent belly laughs were the results of talking with friends.

The most effective, satisfying laughs usually come from an actor making a connection to something that has gone before. The connecting line must be truly inspired by the situation on the stage at the moment, and usually can't be planned or recreated later. It is seldom the least bit funny out of context. A laugh resulting from a connection is a classic example ofa moment when "you had to be there," and describing what happened later can't do it justice.

THE PATTERN GAME: LEARNING TO MAKE CONNECTIONS The Pattern Game is basically a word association game. Theplayers take turns calling out words and short phrases inspiredby previous words and phrases, in order to connect as many piecesof information as possible. Connections made during the game moves will allow players to discover different levels of meaning to their ideas, as well as inspire additional ideas forthe scenes to come. The Pattern Game is a great way to demonstrate the principle of "Finding Order Out of Chaos."

Books · Jan 2024

Tom Blank · 7 highlights

The University of Southern California (USC) conducted a study that examined brain activity when people create and interpret funny things, published under the catchy title “The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity.” ... This is what the mad USC scientists found: 1. When we create something we ultimately think is funny, the pleasure center of our brain fires first, followed by the linguistic and logic centers. 2. When we experience something we think is funny, the linguistic and logic centers fire first, followed by the pleasure centers. I argue fun is closer to phenomenon #1. It is the pleasurable feeling you get from doing that precedes anything being interpreted as funny, even by you. That’s why pondering “What would be funny?” is a creative dead end

Improvising may provoke fear, and that’s okay. Fun and fear belong to the pantheon of celebrated contrasts: sweet and salty, pleasure and pain, peanut butter and banana. You know some of their collaborations: suspense movies, roller coasters, and skydiving. A manageable amount of fear in an improvisor is not only expected but a sign of mental health

There is always a focus if there is an observer. If it seems like nothing has the focus, if you swear nothing grabs your attention, then nothingness has your attention. Similarly, if everything competes for the focus, the resulting chaos commands attention. The focus can be the emptiness of a blank page, the ambiguity of a blurred photo, the inscrutability of white noise.

Articles · Jan 2024

Jerry Corley · 6 highlights

Elements of Story

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Every joke is a story. And every story must contain the 5 elements of story which are -Character -Theme -Setting -Plot -Conflict When writing a reverse, the two most important elements are Character and Setting. Which boils down to Who are we talking about, and where are we?

Character & Setting are Most Important

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Articles · Jan 2024

Stillness Speaks(S) · 1 highlight

But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold** *your own myth, without complicated explanation,* so everyone will understand the passage, *We have opened you.* Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired. Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you’ve grown, lifting.

don't be satisfied until you've moved passed the moment or fatigue when deliberately practicing.

Books · Dec 2023

John Brockman · 1 highlight

the more I realized how much social psychology has to offer. One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it’s not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. You have to get inside people’s heads and see the world the way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they’re doing what they’re doing. What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way.

Articles · Dec 2023

Jared Volle · 146 highlights

When I play my own game, everyone is happier. It lets me work from a position of strength. I can give the audience the best of who I am. So not only does the audience get treated to something unique, fun and different, but they also get to experience me at the top of my game. That’s my job as a speaker and it’s all of our jobs as creators.

Joke Telling vs. Storytelling

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Joke telling and comedic storytelling create humor in almost entirely different ways. ... Joke telling structures emphasize surprise and misdirection. Most are designed so that the setup will lead the audience to generate a false assumption, bad prediction, or some type of misconception. The punchline then surprises the audience by breaking that false assumption. ... Storytelling doesn’t require any broken assumptions, bad predictions, or misdirections. It simply refers to the natural way we communicate with each other in daily life. It places a heavy emphasis on how a problem occurs and what happens as a result. It typically works in the exact opposite direction as conventional jokes. Instead of breaking an assumption, the audience’s correct assumptions actually enhance the humor by allowing them to empathize and identify with the comedian or the characters of a story.

Articles · Dec 2023

Jared Volle · 36 highlights

Flow-Inducing Goals - Gamers follow the storyline. They understand where they are and where they need to be. Simply put, the goal is to win… and there’s a fairly clear path toward that victory. As you’ll learn later, the type of goals that produce flow isn’t the same as the long- term and short term goals you might have for your career. ... Effective Feedback - A gamer can make a mistake, die, and try again. The ability to keep trying allows him to learn from mistakes and quickly develop his skills at a new game. Contrast this with the ambiguous feedback we get in the real world that makes it difficult to know exactly how well we’re doing at any given time. ... Balance Between Skills and Challenge - Games start off easy, allowing a gamer to explore his new world. As the gamer’s skill increases, the challenges grow as well. He’s never bored because the game is providing a challenge, but the challenge is never so high that he gets overly frustrated or gives up. ... The Game Is Fun For Its Own Sake - Games are fun for their own sake. A gamer isn’t trying to “get something” from playing a game. It’s not like a horrible job he must grin-and-bare until he gets his paycheck. Playing the game is its own reward.

How To Take Control of Creative Flow

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Motivation

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Books · Dec 2023

Robert Hauptman; · 3 highlights

In a ‘post-truth’ world, facts are less influential than emotion and belief. --Michael V. Hayden

People make so many [bad] decisions based on emotions. --Toni Ortner

Everything that is bad derives from our emotions, but then so too does everything that is good. Emotional reaction is so menacing that five of the seven deadly sins are emotional in nature: greed, gluttony, envy, wrath, and lust. Even laziness and pride might be snuck in here. Emotional reaction supersedes its rational, logical antithesis of which we humans are so proud. Emotions control our destines. It is often possible to decipher another’s emotional state by observing his or her tears, laughter, enraged face, or facial contortions--but not if a person attempts to conceal just how sad or happy, angry or aroused he or she happens to be. Luckily, computer scientists have come to our rescue and it is now possible for robots and software to interpret emotions.

Books · Dec 2023

Eric Barker · 11 highlights

We’ll learn about what Harvard professor Gautam Mukunda calls “intensifiers.” Like Jure Robič’s insanity, intensifiers are qualities that, on average, are negative but in certain contexts produce sweeping benefits that devastate the competition.

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed eighty-one high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives. But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero.

schools reward being a generalist. There is little recognition of student passion or expertise. The real world, however, does the reverse. Arnold, talking about the valedictorians, said, “They’re extremely well rounded and successful, personally and professionally, but they’ve never been devoted to a single area in which they put all their passion. That is not usually a recipe for eminence.”

Articles · Dec 2023

By Jerry Corley · 122 highlights

AG

Bill Cosby, another legendary comedian, talked about the importance of reading and writing everyday and how that contributed to his success. Without the ability to write material, he would not have been nearly as successful as he is.

This didn’t age well

the pay is good. A network staff writer on a variety show or talk show like Late Night With David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, Jay Leno or The Jimmy Kimmel Show, earns around four thousand dollars a week minimum. That's right, minimum. If he/she writes a 2-minute sketch, he or she can be paid an additional six thousand dollars!

Books · Dec 2023

Anders Ericsson · 68 highlights

The true character of perfect pitch was revealed in 2014, thanks to a beautiful experiment carried out at the Ichionkai Music School in Tokyo and reported in the scientific journal Psychology of Music. The Japanese psychologist Ayako Sakakibara recruited twenty-four children between the ages of two and six and put them through a months-long training course designed to teach them to identify, simply by their sound, various chords played on the piano. The chords were all major chords with three notes, such as a C-major chord with middle C and the E and G notes immediately above middle C. The children were given four or five short training sessions per day, each lasting just a few minutes, and each child continued training until he or she could identify all fourteen of the target chords that Sakakibara had selected. Some of the children completed the training in less than a year, while others took as long as a year and a half. Then, once a child had learned to identify the fourteen chords, Sakakibara tested that child to see if he or she could correctly name individual notes. After completing training every one of the children in the study had developed perfect pitch and could identify individual notes played on the piano.

In short, perfect pitch is not the gift, but, rather, the ability to develop perfect pitch is the gift—and, as nearly as we can tell, pretty much everyone is born with that gift.

One of my favorite testimonies on this topic came from Ray Allen, a ten-time All-Star in the National Basketball Association and the greatest three-point shooter in the history of that league. Some years back, ESPN columnist Jackie MacMullan wrote an article about Allen as he was approaching his record for most three-point shots made. In talking with Allen for that story, MacMullan mentioned that another basketball commentator had said that Allen was born with a shooting touch—in other words, an innate gift for three-pointers. Allen did not agree. “I’ve argued this with a lot of people in my life,” he told MacMullan. “When people say God blessed me with a beautiful jump shot, it really pisses me off. I tell those people, ‘Don’t undermine the work I’ve put in every day.’ Not some days. Every day. Ask anyone who has been on a team with me who shoots the most. Go back to Seattle and Milwaukee, and ask them. The answer is me.” And, indeed, as MacMullan noted, if you talk to Allen’s high school basketball coach you will find that Allen’s jump shot was not noticeably better than his teammates’ jump shots back then; in fact, it was poor. But Allen took control, and over time, with hard work and dedication, he transformed his jump shot into one so graceful and natural that people assumed he was born with it. He took advantage of his gift—his real gift.

Books · Nov 2023

Erica Spiegelman · 3 highlights

Try saying affirmations upon waking up and getting into bed. • Take a deep breath in for 3 counts and release for 3 counts. Repeat until you feel centered and present. • Repeat each affirmation about 10 times. • Listen to yourself as you say each affirmation and focus on the words as they leave your mouth. As you say them, believe them to be true. • Looking into the mirror and reciting affirmations is highly effective. Making eye contact with yourself and expressing love, appreciation, and respect may strike some as corny or over the top, but if that is your reaction, perhaps it’s time to give it a try. People who love themselves unconditionally can express self-love without making a joke out of it.

Be patient. It may take some time before you notice any changes, so stick with your practice!

I am courageous for choosing this path and am proud of myself. It is not easy to choose recovery. I recognize that I am making a brave choice in centering my life around my health and wellness.

It isn’t easy. I know right from experience; but neither is the other way

Books · Nov 2023

Albert-László Barabási · 234 highlights

My dad, a truck driver for the family business at a mere ten years old, could crawl underneath an ailing car, poke around for a few minutes, and emerge with blackened fingers and a pleased expression, the problem fixed. He spent his life always running something—a school, a museum, a company—approaching each job with the mind-set of a tinkerer, rolling up his sleeves and making it work no matter the circumstance.

I love this kind of stuff—the math behind our social fabric, the way numbers provide a framework for understanding the essence of our connectedness. When I use models and tools to delve into unlikely topics for scientific analyses, these frameworks inevitably deepen our knowledge.

We don’t question the validity of the forecast, though a century ago prophesying a monumental storm would have seemed like witchcraft.

Articles · Nov 2023

Simon Sarris · 4 highlights

Speak low if you speak love. — Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

Listening is a skill. One you should take seriously and one that might have atrophied in recent times.

It becomes harder to practice listening as conversation takes on these shorter expectations, in terms of the back-and-forth. It becomes difficult to say much that’s meaningful or long. But you can practice this. You can practice it by trying to draw out someone in conversation, to give more than just pauses between your own sentences, to ask for the whole story. Above all you can respect the pause. This is difficult to do in groups, where anyone rushes to fill any gaps. But it's quite possible with two people to make the threads much longer. It’s especially easy if you are doing something together, such as walking, or working on something.

Books · Nov 2023

Anderson, Jarod · 8 highlights

MERCY The old you buzzes around your skull like a bee in the kitchen window. Don’t swat it. Be kind. We must hope that our current selves will one day step aside to make room for better versions of us. Shuttle the old you outside in a mason jar. Let it climb onto the lilac in the sun.

OUR CRAFT People make meaning like bees make honey. Gathering experiences and images, synthesizing them into something new, rich, uniquely ours. Respect the meaning you make, the family you choose, the wisdom you craft, sweet and golden on your tongue

This book focuses on the ideas and themes that matter to me. Gratitude to nature. Magic hiding in plain sight. The beauty of impermanence and our close kinship with the world we inhabit. Many of these poems started as social media posts or fragments of scripts for The CryptoNaturalist, my fiction podcast about strange nature and a man who finds beauty and meaning in the unusual. I hope the ideas in this book are useful to you. They have been very useful to me.

Books · Nov 2023

Amanda Eyre Ward · 1 highlight

“The difficult part of getting clean isn’t that initial burst of rehab. It’s the arduous process of carving out a sober identity. This book is a big-hearted, big-brained way to find that new life. It’s a charming, humorous exploration of learning how to do right by ourselves.” —Joshua Mohr, author of Sirens

Books · Nov 2023

Stanton Peele · 55 highlights

The idea that addiction develops isn’t new. What is unique and remarkable about this book is the authors’ attention to the complexity of that process. Their nuanced model, backed up by rich biographical vignettes as well as clear, reliable data, is especially sensitive to the interplay of developmental timing (stages of development) and the massive impacts of the social environment—both spawning addiction and ultimately helping to overcome it. Peele and Rhoads skillfully refute the faulty (but fashionable) conclusion that addiction is a brain disease. Instead, their view of addiction as a turbulent but natural stage of need fulfillment allows us to replace the bogey man of chronic illness with an emphasis on empowerment, determination, and personal growth. A truly comprehensive and masterful piece of work.”

It’s Not a Disease How does our Developmental Model differ from the standard addiction-as-disease model? We do not see addiction as a permanent personal trait. Instead, we see it as something that ebbs and flows in individuals over time, and that most of us are bound to outgrow. We all encounter addictions in our lives—although for some of us they are far more severe and long-lasting than for others.

Overcoming the Effects of Trauma The widespread idea that specific childhood traumas permanently change people’s brains and perpetually predispose them to addiction is really just a variant on the standard disease model. We oppose all disease-theory approaches. Explaining addictions and mental disorders in adults as being caused by trauma leads to circular, negative self-reflection. We oppose the application of such disease theories to children because of how they lead children—and their parents and teachers—to label themselves with permanent childhood conditions such as ADHD, Oppositional-Defiant Disorder, Depression, and Bipolar Disorder

Books · Nov 2023

Clarke, Matthew · 33 highlights

This book was written to help those who are struggling to quit cannabis, as well as to help me overcome my own addiction. My own quitting process involved three years of cutting down, stopping, starting, stopping, repeatedly relapsing, before finally stopping for good. This book is a result of my research and my journey of self-discovery that enabled me to be able to quit for good.

Addictions ... started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were ... less intelligent than goldfish.” William Gibson

Pokémon or drugs? Why not both? My weed habit is like koffing if we shared a lung. Good at repelling anyone, both those who do and don’t like Pokémon or drugs

You slowly go about your day. Maybe you work, maybe you don’t. Conversation is difficult; you are unable to look people in the eye, unable to even string a coherent sentence together. You feel ashamed that you have little-to-no social skills. You never laugh or smile anymore; you seem to be in a permanent state of numbness. All you are concerned about is looking towards the next high, even though each subsequent high of the day is less and less effective at making you feel ok.

Yep.

Articles · Nov 2023

Musicnotes · 4 highlights

Faster notes are signified with either flags, like the ones discussed above, or with beams between the notes. Each flag halves the value of a note, so a single flag signifies 1/2 of a quarter note, a double flag halves that to 1/4 of a quarter note, et cetera. Beams do the same while allowing us to read the music more clearly and keep the notation less cluttered. As you can see, there’s no difference in how you count the eighth and 16th notes above.

Step 2: Pick Up the Beat To play music, you need to know its meter, the beat you use when dancing, clapping, or tapping your foot along with a song. When reading music, the meter is presented similar to a fraction, with a top number and a bottom number. We call this the song’s time signature. The top number tells you how many beats are in a measure, the space between each vertical line (called a bar). The bottom number tells you the note value (the length) of each beat.

A common mnemonic to remember note names for the lines of the bass clef is: GBDFA “Good Boys Do Fine Always.” And for the spaces: ACEG, “All Cows Eat Grass.”

Articles · Nov 2023

wikipedia.org · 1 highlight

Semiotics is frequently seen as having important [anthropological](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology) and [sociological](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology) dimensions; for example the Italian semiotician and novelist [Umberto Eco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco) proposed that every cultural phenomenon may be studied as communication.

what?! really? So dabbing or vabbing or any of those obscene new trends can be studied as communication? Like vabbing is like "saying hello" but with that extra girl-rizz? IDK; this just a riff on something I really don't understand. But this phrase is interesting

Books · Nov 2023

Tina Fey · 27 highlights

I only hope that one day I can frighten my daughter this much. Right now, she’s not scared of my husband or me at all. I think it’s a problem. I was a freshman home from college the first time my dad said, “You’re going out at ten P.M.? I don’t think so,” and I just laughed and said, “It’s fine.” I feel like my daughter will be doing that to me by age six. How can I give her what Don Fey gave me? The gift of anxiety. The fear of getting in trouble. The knowledge that while you are loved, you are not above the law. The Worldwide Parental Anxiety System is failing if this many of us have made sex tapes

In 1997 I flew to New York from Chicago to interview for a writing position at Saturday Night Live. It seemed promising because I’d heard the show was looking to diversify. Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity

About an hour into the wait, the assistants started making popcorn in a movie theater popcorn machine—something I would later learn signaled Lorne’s imminent arrival. To this day the smell of fresh popcorn causes me to experience stress, hunger, and sketch ideas for John Goodman.

Books · Nov 2023

Eric Schmidt · 99 highlights

A smart creative is a firehose of new ideas that are genuinely new. Her perspective is different from yours or ours. It’s even occasionally different from her own perspective, for a smart creative can play the perspective chameleon when she needs to. She is curious creative. She is always questioning, never satisfied with the status quo, seeing problems to solve everywhere and thinking that she is just the person to solve them. She can be overbearing. She is risky creative. She is not afraid to fail, because she believes that in failure there is usually something valuable she can salvage. Either that, or she is just so damn confident she knows that even in the event that she does fail, she can pick herself up and get it right the next time around. She is self-directed creative. She doesn’t wait to be told what to do and sometimes ignores direction if she doesn’t agree with it. She takes action based on her own initiative, which is considerable. She is open creative. She freely collaborates, and judges ideas and analyses on their merits and not their provenance. If she were into needlepoint, she would sew a pillow that said, “If I give you a penny, then you’re a penny richer and I’m a penny poorer, but if I give you an idea, then you will have a new idea but I’ll have it too.” Then she would figure out a way to make the pillow fly around the room and shoot lasers. She is thorough creative. She is always on and can recite the details, not because she studies and memorizes, but because she knows them. They are her details. She is communicative creative. She is funny and expresses herself with flair and even charisma, either one-to-one or one-to-many. Not every smart creative has all of these characteristics, in fact very few of them do. But they all must possess business savvy, technical knowledge, creative energy, and a hands-on approach to getting things done. Those are the fundamentals.

How many of these skills can I reliably tote?

It is also why they are uniquely difficult to manage, especially under old models, because no matter how hard you try, you can’t tell people like that how to think. If you can’t tell someone how to think, then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think. And make it a place where they want to come every day

All you need is the insight that your industry is transforming at a rapid pace, the guts to take a risk and be part of that transformation, and the willingness and ability to attract the best smart creatives and lead them to make it happen.

willingness goes a long long way. Am I willing to fail? Am I willing to do the work to succeed? Am I willing to take responsibility for my leadership skills and my work?

Books · Nov 2023

Jesse David Fox · 33 highlights

Humor is the last stage of existential awareness before faith. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments Comedy is to make everybody laugh at everything, and deal with things, you idiot. —JOAN RIVERS, to a heckler in Wisconsin

The audience was younger than I expected, considering how long Seinfeld had been famous. They reminded me of, well, myself. My feeling of How did I get here? transformed into How did we get here? Before that point, I had a narrative of myself as a fan of comedy, starting with me as a kid watching Seinfeld reruns every day while doing my homework and building to me talking onstage with the guy with the name. But in that moment I started seeing myself as a part of a much larger cultural shift.

I feel if I wanted to parallel this notion while examining my upbringing: I didn't grow up with comedy being the focus of my gaze. I remember battling deeply with a lot of fear and anxiety, and this one scary story that kept me up one night when I was visiting my mom at her apartment in Teaneck, New Jersey. I remember being terrified by this story of the "klink-klink slide" girl, a girl who was bullied and cut her legs off. She hunts people down and all they hear before she shows up is "klink... klink... Slide" It's probably not very scary reading this but I was a terrified 11 year old. I remember the Zohan came out recently; an Israeli girl who I went to school with told me about it, so I found it on a streaming website, and by the end of it, the scary story I heard earlier that night didn't seem scary anymore. I remember comedy becoming a much bigger part of my life when I found eddie murphy Raw, and I realized Dr. Do-little really was sick in the head. And I found Bo Burnham who made me feel smart. I memorized all his songs in middle school, and sang them to myself on the bus even if one girl used it as an opportunity to make fun of me. I remember tosh.0 introducing me to Daniel Tosh's stand-up; I was young and I appreciated his edginess. I remember when I'd spend a lot of time at my mom's house in long island, when she was still with my step dad; I'd stay up late watching whatever was on netflix. MADTV became a big part of my watchlist. The comics were the primary reason, but I loved MADTV. "The back of yo head look ridiculous" I remember watching Joe Koy explain the joy he remembered when he saw his kid and thought about the night he made him. I definitely wasn't nerdy about comedy back then, but it always found it's way to me. Comedy movies I'd watch over and over again on my ipod classic. Grandma's boy, and knocked up, and american pie 1, 2, & 3. I became a sucker for the spoof in high school. Scary Movies, Blazing Saddles, Space Balls. I had a good time finding all those movies for the first time.

A few months before I interviewed Seinfeld, I had been talking to Comedy Central’s head of research at the time, Chanon Cook, about a 2012 survey she conducted, which showed that millennials viewed humor as the number-one factor in their self-definition. “Comedy is to this generation what music was to previous generations,” she told me.[1](#notes-ch1-1) “They use it to define themselves. They use it to connect with people.” Comedy Central called them Comedy Natives.[2](#notes-ch1-2) If you look at social media behavior—posting funny videos on Facebook, tweeting a joke reaction to the news of the day, lip-syncing a favorite sitcom scene on TikTok—it seems that comedy has enmeshed itself in how millennials and now Gen Z communicate. Cook’s analysis pointed to what life started looking like for young people around 2010. Seinfeld had a sense that something had been changing, but he wasn’t exactly familiar with us comedy nerds

Articles · Nov 2023

Michael Schulman · 3 highlights

Yiddish comedy, or Jewish comedy, has to do with Jewish folklore. Sholem Aleichem, that kind of stuff. The mistakenly called “Jewish comedy” of the great comics—it was really New York. It was the streets of New York: the wiseguy, the sharpness that New York gives you that you can’t get anywhere else, but you can get it on the streets of Brooklyn. Jewish comedy was softer and sweeter. New York comedy was tougher and more explosive. There’s some cruelty that you find in New York humor that you wouldn’t find in Yiddish humor. In New York, you make fun of somebody who walks funny. You never find that in Sholem Aleichem. You’d feel pity. There’s no pity in New York. There’s reality and a brushstroke of brutality in it.

You were a drummer when you were a kid. Did drumming teach you anything about comedy? It did. It has to do with punch lines. It has to do with timing. It has to do with buildup and explosions. For a joke to work, I always needed that rim shot, when one of the drumsticks hits the rim of the snare as well as the center of the drum and gives you that crack, that explosion. It’s the same thing with a joke. A man walks into a grocery store. He says, “I want a half a pound of lox. I want some cream cheese.” And he stops and says, “All your shelves are filled with boxes of salt! Do you sell a lot of salt?” And the grocery man says, “Me, if I sell a box of salt a week it’s a miracle. I don’t sell a lot of salt. But the guy that sells me salt—boy, can he sell salt!” That’s the rim shot.

People always talk about how comedy evolves so fast, and it seems like you were catching the audience at a moment when comedy was evolving from the “Boy, are my arms tired” days. Right. Sid was a great teacher of comedy. Sid would do impressions but not of Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, which were au courant. He would do impressions of someone working in the Garment Center. He opened comedy up. No more jokes—character. Character behavior became the kind of comedy that worked for us, not jokes.

Articles · Oct 2023

Anca Szilágyi · 3 highlights

The Romanian man who offered to sell my parents black market antibiotics and syringes was proud to report that during World War II, Romania was the only country that did not kill the Jews. It was 1995, the first time my parents had returned to the Old Country since the 1970s, now with two children and my paternal grandmother in tow. A family pilgrimage. In hotel lobbies, my parents told my brother and me to keep quiet, don’t speak English, lest we get charged the highest rates. They were already getting charged more for their Bucharest accents. Everyone everywhere angling.

I’ve got sacrilege on both sides. My other great-grandmother, Laura, followed this dictum: if it tastes good, it’s Kosher. She snuck smoked pork into her cholent, which went into the village oven over the Sabbath. It’s a family story celebrating irreverence, enjoyment of life.

“Your feet hurt?” the elderly rabbi said in Romanian to his equally elderly friend who was reluctant to leave the house. “Walk on your hands.”

Articles · Oct 2023

lethain.com · 9 highlights

My father retired a few years ago, having worked as a professor at the [University of North Carolina Asheville](https://www.unca.edu/) for the significant majority of his adult life. Since then I’ve spent more time than expected reflecting on his retirement and his preceding career. In particular, reflecting on the idea that my career is something I can deliberately develop over a forty year horizon. Not four IPOs, not fourteen two-year stints, but forty years.

This is a surprisingly dark way to view your life’s work. So as I pondered my father’s retirement, the question that caught hold of me was: How would I approach my work differently if focused on growth and engagement, and if I measured eras not in equity and IPOs but instead in decades? I’d focus on a small handful of things that build together, with each making the others more impactful as they compound over time. I’d focus on pace, people, prestige, profit and learning.

Pace The biggest barrier to a forty year career [is burnout](https://medium.com/compassionate-coding/only-you-can-prevent-tech-burnout-be3f0504c627), and preventing burnout is twofold. First, work on work you find meaningful. Second, manage your pace.

Articles · Oct 2023

Jean Hsu · 2 highlights

Ask culture expectations • Ask for what you want, even if it seems out of reach or like a big unreasonable request • Take care of your own needs, and others will take care of theirs • It’s fine to make requests that people will probably say no to • People say yes to requests that they truly feel good about, say no to ones they don’t

rules of asking. Or "How to ask with falling on your ass" - Ask for you what you want, really want. Don't ask for subway, ask for in n out. - Take care of your own needs. Don't offer to take care of your friend's kid. Only young folk, old folk, and weirdos offer to take care of kids - ask for anything. pro tip: ask people for their social security numbers really early on. They'll say no, but you'll get really good at asking!

Guess culture expectations • Only ask for something if you’re already pretty sure the other person will say yes • Read an abundance of indirect contextual cues to determine if your request is reasonable to make • It’s rude to put someone in a position where they have to say no to you • If the appropriate feelers and context are set, you will never have to make your request at all.

Articles · Oct 2023

laconfidentialmag.com · 2 highlights

Post-graduation, Robinson was set on his plan to work for a couple of years to save enough money to then quit his job and pursue an acting career. He lasted two years as a tech consultant doing backend web programming.

“The hours were ridiculous. I was working like 14, 16-hour days,” Robinson reflects. “I realized this isn’t the life for me. I’m putting 14, 16-hour days working to build these websites for these companies that I don’t care about and I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I was like, ‘What if I just did that for myself? What if I spent 16 hours a day trying to figure out how to be an actor?’”

Articles · Oct 2023

Darren Orf · 2 highlights

Understanding the extremely subtle movements among three orbital bodies is important for space travel—when space agencies need to send [satellites](https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a44970695/silent-barker-satellite-new-space-race/), landers, or spacecraft to a distant planet, they need to know how all the pieces of a system will play together. Hristov’s three-body solutions start with three bodies at rest before entering free fall and being pulled by one another’s gravity. The “solutions” were instances when these three bodies found a way to maintain an orbit around one another.

Many of these solutions look like a jumbled mess of lines. In fact, other than a few known solutions (including one that introduced the [concept of Lagrange points](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/three-body-problem#:~:text=The%20Lagrange%20Points%20are%20positions,des%20Trois%20Corps%2C%201772).)), it’s highly unlikely that any of Hristov’s three-body solutions exists in nature. That’s because, in most cases, three-body problems quickly become two-body ones as the object with the smallest mass is ejected from the [system](https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/g25999987/amazing-new-images-of-planets-solar-system/). But the study of this chaotic math still gives astronomers a deeper understanding about how the [universe](https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a44938366/was-our-universe-created-by-black-hole/) works—even though it’s mathematically impossible to describe.

Articles · Oct 2023

ycombinator.com · 1 highlight

Beyond the importance of controlling the placebo effect, I am worried that a lot of the drug-depression research is overlooking an important possibility: that the thing about ketamine/psilocybin/etc that is helping with depression is not some latent property of the molecule, but rather the actual transcendent experience of the trip. In other words, the trip is the point, not the mechanistic neuro-tinkering [0]. Importantly, this tracks with what we know about the protective effects of things like religiosity against depression. As such, the qualitative experience of the drug might not be something we can (or should) do away with. I would even go as far as suggesting that an absence of transcendence in one's life is precisely what causes a large segment of people to become depressed in the first place, and that perhaps drugs are helpful only insofar as they produce a transcendent experience. This isn't to say we can't take a scientific approach to treating depression, but that has to be balanced with something profoundly metaphysical: the actual qualia of life experience. Wellness isn't the absence of disease; it's the presence of thriving, and that includes within it a component of things like hope, inspiration, and elevation above the ordinary. We used to have various ceremonies designed to turn us towards the numinous, but we've pretty systematically dismantled those in favor of a grounded hyper-rationality [1]. As a scientist, I can't really object to rationality on its own, but it may be worth considering non-rational, transcendent experience as a fundamental psychological need. [0] If you're a materialist, you might object that neurological machinery is not differentiable from qualia. Fair enough! I even agree! My point is simply that medicine needs to consider qualia as a major parameter in the treatment of depression. Fixing depression is not like fixing a car. [1] I suspect most people here are familiar with Nietzsche's "God is dead quote". Many people in my entourage are floored to discover that he correctly predicted the dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, neuroticism and nihilism that is present in modern life.

Articles · Oct 2023

Forbes · 3 highlights

if I had to assume why I'm good at crowd work it's because I've had to adjust in so many different circumstances in different shows throughout my life that were absolutely terrible that I was like this drunk through to the bar is going to ruin this show for me right now if I don't address it and come back with something witty and funny so now I think it it it just sharpened that that skil

I'm a even I'm not as disciplined as a writer as I would like to be um but I believe it was Don DC Curry um who's uh very famous very successful great comedian uh when I was about s 16 or 17 I was opening for him at the Cleveland improv actually and he gave me two really good pieces of advice about standup one about writing one about one was performance-based writing he said try to write five new minutes a day even if it's terrible even if they're not good jokes at all because if you get one minute out of the week that actually works that's 52 minut 52 new minutes for the year if you can come up with a new hour every year that's that's the goal it should be the goal of every stand up comedian is to write a new hour every year and if you do if you write one minute a week that sounds so easy you basically have a whole new hour right there and the other thing performance-based was be okay with silence um this goes for you too audience my audience is so rambunctious

DC Curry is a is a Storyteller and sometimes his jokes are 10 his stories are 10 minutes long and there's not a single laughter for those first nine minutes and they until the 10th minute boom giant punchline uproarious laughter and I remember being so naive I asked backstage like oh man great show like what I I was talking about one joke in specific I was like what's it is it weird that like you're bombing for the first like nine minutes of your of your story and he just started laughing and he was like he's like it's not bombing if you have silence bombing is when they start booing you bombing is when they start talking amongst each other he goes silence is the most powerful thing to have because you have everyone's attention they are giving you they are giving you the opportunity to win them over and you know you have your draw four coming they just have to wait for it so

Books · Oct 2023

Mohr, Jay · 2 highlights

One day Buddy asked me what my monitor onstage was. I asked him what a monitor was. A monitor, Hackett explained, was the number of distracting thoughts in your head when you’re onstage. Thoughts such as “What’s that sound?” “Why is the waitress talking so loud?” and “Why aren’t those people laughing?” are all part of the negative and counterproductive side of your monitor. Basically, any thought that inhibits the projection of your natural self is a piece of your monitor. Buddy’s theory was that the first time a comic goes onstage, his monitor is almost 100. Standing onstage is so foreign and standing in front of a live audience is so frightening that being yourself is the hardest thing to do. Yet in spite of nearly everything in your brain working against you, you still earn applause. Even though you had used less than 1 percent of your natural talent, people still saw a spark in you and wanted you to come back. Buddy went on to explain that as you do more comedy and spend more time onstage, your monitor naturally begins to decrease, and eventually it becomes so small that you can stand onstage and give the audience nothing but your true, funniest self. (Inevitably, I asked Buddy what his monitor was. I assumed, of course, that it would be zero. Buddy replied, “One.” “One? Why not zero?” I asked. He then leaned close to me and whispered, “I always figure out where the fire exits are.” Then he added, “After that, though, it’s 100 percent of 99 percent for the rest of the show!”)

People always ask me how cutthroat it was on the show, and I always honestly say it really wasn’t. There were many cliques, but they were easygoing and friendly ones. I never fell into one particular clique. I would visit all of them, but I never felt comfortable with any of them for very long. It was a lot like high school for me. Friends with everyone, but not really friends with anyone.

Books · Oct 2023

Joe Randazzo · 297 highlights

Every time you take to the stage or the page, you are presuming to waste the time of strangers, and it is best to appreciate early that, in reality, no one cares about your dumb musings. The imperative to speak comes from you, so you had better know why you are doing it. This sounds like a big question, but if I can offer only one thing to the wisdom Joe has expressed and collected here, it’s this: it’s a really small question.

I have never been badly served by stopping before typing a word or taking a step on a stage and asking myself: Why am I doing this? What do I have to say—need to say—on this specific day, to this group of people? It takes rigor, and a certain brave honesty, because sometimes the answer is small and dumb. Even if the answer in that moment is, “I hate Mondays, but I love lasagna,” if that’s the truth, then you have made something that no one else in the world can (except for Jim Davis).

I know why I am writing this. First, because Joe told me to. And also because I feel compelled to say to you: In a comedy-saturation era, where every joke you can think of has already been made five times, twelve minutes ago, knowing yourself is not merely essential to being funny (and for that matter, being human), it is more important than being funny. Because truly not everyone can do it.

Books · Oct 2023

Warren Berger · 15 highlights

But my work as a journalist also brought me into contact with inventors, entrepreneurs, business leaders, artists, and scientists, who often were the subjects of my writing. I found that many of these people tended to use the questioning tool in a different way—their questions were often directed inward. They might be trying to solve a problem or create something original, and in doing so, were likely to begin with questions that they asked themselves: Why does this problem or situation exist? What are the underlying forces, the larger issues at play? What might be an interesting new way to come at this challenge?

The result is a checklist manifesto, wherein the checklists are made up entirely of beautiful questions. What makes them beautiful? To me, any question that causes people to shift their thinking is a beautiful one. These questions are intended to do that—to remind you to slow down and think more, to broaden your perspective, to see past biases, creative blocks, and emotional reactions.

Decision-making (at least good decision-making) demands critical thinking—which is rooted in questioning.

Books · Sep 2023

Bob Odenkirk · 21 highlights

Use the Host! • Write for the Ladies! • Something topical! Read the news! • One Set!—no films!! • Loud and/or Recurring Characters!! I figured out that if I could incorporate two of these strictures into a sketch, it would greatly improve my chance of getting something on the show. Sound like no fun? It was! Reverse-engineering comedy is an inspiration killer, but it’s a good list if you ever get hired there, so tear this page out and stuff it in your pocket.

Farley, Sandler, Rock, Schneider, and Spade made me feel like I had something to offer, and I was happy to help them put together some of their new ideas. Sandler, most of all, made me see the show, and comedy, in a new and better way, because Adam was having a good time. The intimidation factor of SNL, of the big time, of more experienced people around him, did not faze Adam. He would happily pitch the thinnest of notions, and he had a blast doing it, and his good energy was infectious. I needed some of that. It was the opposite of this brainy math-problem pursuit of the “craft” of sketch writing, and a great reminder that, especially in comedy, performance matters more than writing or ideas. Loony behavior trumps clever constructions….Of course, if you have both, well, then you got something truly great.

Steve had recorded the entire first season of Get a Life, which I would describe as a sitcom turned inside out. Get a Life had just enough sweetness and heart to it to keep it from being deconstructionist absurdist art, but it was more commentary than not. If you knew the sitcom conventions of the past thirty years, the show was making fun of them, broadly and rudely. I loved it.

Articles · Sep 2023

OLIVER DOUBLE · 1 highlight

ma

Books · Sep 2023

Anil Seth · 2 highlights


A group of bees working together can achieve abilities resembling those of a single human brain.

joke premise: Is it a person or a collection of bees! "I don't care if bees are endangered, I want some fucking drone doing the menial labor I refuse to do!" - Some speciesist capitalist somewhere Some of the bees in my brain don't like you. Some of the bees in my brain are fighting with the others on an important subject. Some bees are empathetic and are pro-choice. Most bees are. The other bees are way to keen to listen to the queen bee and they are passive aggressive in the way they start arguments. This is what I called bee-hive-ural (behavioral) cognitive bzzz-onance (dissonance)

Books · Sep 2023

Judy Carter · 302 highlights

Life opens up opportunities to you, and you either take them or you stay afraid of taking them.”

1.Thou Shalt Not Steal Don’t “borrow” jokes from other comics, from the internet, or from the examples in this book. The audience wants to hear your original story and voice. That’s your bankable asset. Among comics, stealing is the original sin.

2.Thou Shalt Not Lie Truth is stranger, and funnier, than fiction. Authenticity is the secret sauce of your act. Audiences want to know you and can tell if you’re being disingenuous. “The hardest thing to do is to be true to yourself, especially when everybody is watching.” —Dave Chappelle

Books · Sep 2023

Josh Peck · 3 highlights

A friend of mine in sobriety once told me, “Be careful how much growing you do alone. A lot of people become these Fabergé eggs, perfectly pristine, detailed, and ornate, but the second you throw them around a little, they shatter. Once you get a year sober, get busy helping others; that’s the only way you’ll continue to grow, by seeing your own humanity through the lens of other people and how you affect them.

The hard times are here to teach us, and the good times are to remind us what we’re fighting for.

Just know I almost gave up a thousand times. Just know that despite how good my life is, when faced with adversity, my mind still romanticizes getting a bunch of drugs and some White Castle hamburgers and seeing what happens. Just know that I still don’t really feel comfortable at parties. Just know that you can do whatever I did but better, and that when you do, I’ll expect you to write the book for the next round of people like us.

Books · Sep 2023

Mark Manson · 47 highlights

Most of us pursue confidence out of a desire to embody some vision of our perfect selves. We have this image in our head of some bad ass who is always right, always self-assured, and everything goes right for. It’s human nature. But indulging our fantasies can oddly make us feel worse about ourselves in the real world. And ironically, it’s letting go that vision of ourselves being perfect that allows us to behave confidently

Shut Up and Be Grateful The fact that you’re reading this sentence means that you are richer and more educated than 99.5% of people in human history. It means you have almost immediate access to over half of all of the information and data ever created by the human race. It means you have the ability to educate yourself on subjects people previously spent their entire lifetimes learning.

You may be unhappy with your love life, but just a few generations ago, casual sex was an impossibility, contraception was a rarity, and you could be disowned by your family for fooling around with the wrong person. A few generations before that, you likely never went to school with someone of the opposite gender and your parents chose who you married. In some countries and regions, you could have been killed for sleeping with or even flirting with the wrong person.

Books · Sep 2023

Scott Dikkers · 146 highlights

Given that surprise is the one ingredient that all humor requires, let’s look at how we can generate it in prose. Surprise can come in many forms. We’ve learned ways to engineer surprise by borrowing strengths from other media. You can add a surprising image to your writing to draw readers into it. You can pair your writing with a video in order to introduce the critical tool of timing. You can write through the voice of a character, conjuring the human connection that makes media like stage, TV and movies so engaging. These tactics can be effective for initially drawing a reader into your writing. Using a character voice, especially, can command a reader’s attention. However, once they get the joke, or understand what’s supposed to be funny about it, they may tire of the writing and abandon it if there’s nothing deeper going on.

Subtext in humor writing is usually a value judgment or opinion held by the writer. In the good Satirical writing, that Subtext is universal, something that just about anyone can relate to. In the very best writing, it points out something wrong with the world, a fatal flaw or weakness in humanity or the universe. It can even be a sad fact, something that cannot be changed, yet the writer is compelled to point it out, to publicly yearn for things to be different.

Humor-Writing Tip #7: Have Something to Say To be a writer, the first thing you need is something to say. Without that, why are you writing? By regularly sifting through your notebook and Morning Pages, you’ll eventually find something worthy of being communicated to others that you can get passionate about.

Articles · Sep 2023

Ivan Vendrov · 4 highlights

How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here? In my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last vestiges of creativity and agency from our products. I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know how to fight it. I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User.

Simply put, companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users that derive very little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize low value users by selling them ads. Often, it’s because your business relies on network effects and even low value users can help you build a moat. So the north star metric for designers and engineers is typically something like Daily Active Users, or DAUs for short: the number of users who log into your app in a 24 hour period.

Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.

Books · Sep 2023

David Nihill · 17 highlights

Incidentally, when my cliff jumping did go wrong, it led to a shattered leg on an isolated island whose only form of medical assistance was a vet. Thankfully, based on his prior experience, he didn't put me down.

I wondered if standup comedy could be broken down into processes aimed at mastery, as tested and popularized by Ferriss in his top-selling books. Could I use comedy to craft more memorable, engaging, and effective presentations for the audience without making myself want to die? What should I focus on in order to obtain the outcome I desired? What are comedians learning the hard way on stage, often through trial and error as they clock up the 10,000 hours that author Malcolm Gladwell says make a master? How does someone who is not naturally funny kill it on stage? By studying comedy and the processes used by standup comedians, can we make our presentations and key messages stand out while at the same time overcoming fears of public speaking. Can this be done quickly? I’d soon find out that the answer to all of these is ‘yes.’

I would figure out what makes a joke funny, how to best craft and deliver it, and what comedians knew that business speakers did not. Surely the lessons crossed over, and I was going to figure out how.

Articles · Sep 2023

wikipedia.org · 1 highlight

A prolific programmer, Swartz helped develop the [web feed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed) format [RSS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS), the technical architecture for [Creative Commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons)–an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses, the website framework web.py, and [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown), a [lightweight markup language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language) format

RSS?! That’s some original gangster programming shit

Books · Sep 2023

Mike Thomas · 41 highlights

Looking back, Paul thinks his and Phil’s semi-regular jaunts to Disneyland and the iconic characters they encountered there might have sparked Phil’s interest in cartooning, which blossomed during his two years at Orville Wright. “Phil could draw anything,” schoolmate Ettore Berardinelli says

Had he tried to be a stand-up comic instead of a sketch actor, Tracy Newman thinks, Phil might have struggled “because he didn’t have a point of view as a human being.” Not onstage, anyway. He was most comfortable and at his performing best when cloaked or otherwise obscured by a crazy wig, a different voice, or the rakishly cocked hat and drab trench coat of one Chick Hazard

Quick-talking and tightly wound, the all-business Hazard rarely smiled and spoke hard-boiled staccato sentences in a rat-a-tat-tat cadence. (“I was a sucker for long legs. I wanted to shinny up one of hers like a native boy looking for coconuts.”) Every Hazard bit—always launched with a Chick monologue that conveyed crucial exposition—was a largely improvised murder mystery, with recurring characters and on-the-spot role assignments chosen by Phil

Articles · Sep 2023

readwise.io · 1 highlight

The Mathematics of Juggling

Articles · Sep 2023

Scott P. Scheper · 1 highlight

"FORK" THE CONGREGATION!

Fork the congregation and make ikigai out of the result of your work by changing the dynamic river around you

Books · Dec 2021

Thomas Pynchon · 6 highlights

Beyond the Zero Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. —wernher von braun

though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off

It's... Colder than the nipple on a witch's tit! Colder than a bucket of penguin shit! Colder than the hairs of a polar bear's ass! Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!

Books · Nov 2022

Malcolm Collins · 3 highlights

When trying to make an arbitrage play, do not be confused by what society implies that people want and by what people actually want. For example, society pretends that both nerdy males and females have low value in most markets, when in reality, once you are out of high school (and sometimes well before), the nerdy archetype has one of the highest values on the marketplace, meaning that targeting otherwise traditionally attractive nerds is a terrible arbitrage play for someone who is indifferent about the archetype.

While keeping a close eye on Desirability Ratios seems like common sense to us, we have never heard anyone in the relationship industry highlight this dynamic. This is odd because the effects of this on the dating and marriage markets are extreme. This is one of the many reasons why celebrity relationships are so short-lived and fraught with conflict—celebrities essentially have maxed-out aggregate desirability, making it virtually impossible for their individual desirability to their partner to stably stay above their aggregate desirability.

Talking with individuals who say guys or girls always act like X at Y feels like talking to a fisherman who insists that all fish have whiskers. When you point out that all the lures in his tackle box are designed specifically to only catch catfish, he just turns and gives you a quizzical look saying, “what's your point?”

Books · Feb 2022

Isaac Asimov · 13 highlights

Psychohistory dealt not with man, but man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.

Barr shrugged. “Attack now or never; with a single ship, or all the force in the Empire; by military force or economic pressure; by candid declaration of war or by treacherous ambush. Do whatever you wish in your fullest exercise of freewill. You will still lose.” “Because of Hari Seldon’s dead hand?” “Because of the dead hand of the mathematics of human behavior that can neither be stopped, swerved, nor delayed.” The two faced each other in deadlock, until the general stepped back. He said simply, “I’ll take that challenge. It’s a dead hand against a living will.”

MATHEMATICS The synthesis of the calculus of n-variables and of n-dimensional geometry is the basis of what Seldon once called “my little algebra of humanity”.… ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA 8

Books · Aug 2023

Nick de Semlyen · 10 highlights

With a $4.6 million budget to play with, the team got busy realizing their vision. One day Martin read about a $3 million home on the Sunset Strip, owned by a young pair of Saudi Arabian newlyweds, which was so horrendously decorated that their neighbors had complained. He and Reiner canceled plans to build Navin’s tacky mansion on a soundstage and rented the house for $50,000 a week instead. “The sheik and his bride were like the most bad-taste couple in the world,” says Gottlieb, who returned to the project to cameo as gloriously monikered villain Iron Balls McGinty, a man with, yes, metal testes. “I visited one day and kept saying of some bit of outré interior decor, ‘Where did you find this?’ And he would shrug and say, ‘It was here.’ They had painted the statuary outside and pasted pubic hair on the nudes. Eventually the couple were recalled back to Saudi Arabia and there was a mysterious fire and the place burned down.”

As a final push for the movie, he and Reiner decided to do something unprecedented and suitably silly: host a glitzy world premiere not for The Jerk, but for its two-minute trailer. Keeping poker faces on throughout, they arrived at the Village Theater in Westwood in limos and did interviews on the red carpet, Reiner attesting that the trailer was “a director’s dream—it came in on time and $94 under budget.” Inside, the lights dimmed as Martin made a brief speech, the trailer played, and then, fewer than five minutes after the event had begun, the audience poured back out onto the street.

Finally, he decided he’d had enough. He talked to Lorne Michaels, and they came up with a sketch in which he would address the viewing audience directly. On March 19, 1977, shortly after Dr. John performed his song “Let’s Make a Better World,” the show cut to Murray sitting behind a desk. Wearing a smart red sweater, his hair neatly combed, he looked somberly into the camera and delivered a three-minute monologue. “I’m a little bit concerned. I don’t think I’m making it on the show. I’m a funny guy but I haven’t been so funny on the show. My friends say, ‘How come they’re givin’ you all those parts that aren’t funny?’ Well, it’s not the material. It’s me….” He went on, explaining that his father died when he was seventeen and that all he wanted was to make him proud. “I just want to make it as a Not Ready for Prime Time Player,” he said with a frown. “When that’s done, I’ll be able to stand here on a Saturday night, in the middle of Rockefeller Plaza, New York City, New York 10020…and say, ‘Dad? I did it.’ He’d like that.”

Books · Aug 2023

Scott Dikkers · 98 highlights

The difference between a professional comedy writer and a random person off the street is that the professional comedy writer’s material works more often than the non-professional’s. There are fewer mistakes. A writer whose humor succeeds most of the time is considered an outstanding success by any standard. In this way, comedy is more like baseball than brain surgery. You might lose more than you win, but you can still maintain a solid batting average. And the good news is, in comedy writing nobody dies when you make a mistake.

comedy college.

We’ll focus on the atom of comedy: the single, one-line joke or funny concept. Learning this elemental particle is a critical first step to success in comedy.

Books · Jan 2022

Howard Bloom · 2 highlights

In the body, each cell comes equipped with a mechanism for what scientists call “apoptosis,” “programmed cell death,” “an intrinsic cell suicide program” that researchers at University College in London say must be actively restrained from going into action by positive feedback indicating the cell is necessary to the larger organism.92 When a hospital patient is forced to spend months in bed, seldom using his legs, many of the legs’ constituent cells, sensing that they are no longer needed, dwindle to mere shadows of their former selves. Others simply disappear.93 When a human spends weeks or months in space, his heart no longer has to labor mightily, pumping blood upward in defiance of gravity’s force. The heart shrinks dramatically94 as the cells that no longer deem themselves of value scale down to an existence just one step removed from death. The individual is a cell in the social superorganism. When he feels he is no longer necessary to the larger group, he, too, begins to wither away.

I feel like apoptosis is a parallel narrative that might explain addiction. Speaking from my experience, with my mangled brain, I tend to fall off the wagon when I feel lonely, or disconnected. This is made worse by the fact that I isolate in active addiction, making it harder to connect to people and things and activities outside of drugs. There is more to say here, but right now, I’m high and tied up.

Remove the sponge cell from the sponge, prevent it from finding its way back to its brethren, and it dies. Scrape a liver cell from the liver, and in its isolation it too will shrivel and give up life. But what happens if you remove a human from his social bonds, wrenching him from the superorganism of which he is a part?

Books · Nov 2021

Frank Herbert · 41 highlights

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

You must teach me someday how you do that,” he said, “the way you thrust your worries aside and turn to practical matters. It must be a Bene Gesserit thing.” “It’s a female thing,” she said.

Even as she spoke, Jessica laughed inwardly at the pride behind her words. What was it St. Augustine said? she asked herself. “The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.” Yes—I am meeting more resistance lately. I could use a quiet retreat by myself.

Books · Oct 2022

Marianne Bellotti · 21 highlights

n the summer of 2016, I found myself sitting in front of the weirdest system I had ever encountered as a software engineer. There was a fairly banal web application written in Java that was connecting to what I would eventually figure out was a mainframe. The mainframe itself wasn’t the weird part. When you venture into the world of legacy modernization, you quickly realize that mainframes are still everywhere—in banks, in government, buried deep in the foundation of civil society. Having a web application send requests to a mainframe wasn’t so weird. I had a hard time accepting that a technology designed for bulk transactions would respond quickly enough to meet the demands of a website at a reasonable scale, but despite my concerns, it did appear to be doing okay. No, what was weird was that the mainframe in question was from the 1960s and storing data on magnetic tape. There was no way that mainframe could respond quickly enough, so when I saw this on the architecture diagrams, I focused on a group of mysterious machines that were sitting in the middle; a modern web application was on one side and an ancient mainframe on the other. The only information I had about this cluster of machines was the acronym the organization used for it. Nobody on the engineering teams I was working with seemed to know what the machines did. It took a lot of digging through several decades of documentation before I figured out what they were: Unisys ClearPath Dorados. In other words, they were more mainframes, newer ones, that were effectively configured like a cache in front of the old mainframe. That was how 60-year-old code was responding fast enough to serve requests from the modern internet. The organization had a new machine sitting in between that was storing a temporary copy of the relevant data. About once a week, the new mainframes would request an update from the older mainframe. When I asked an engineer who worked on this system what he thought about this arrangement, he said something that has stuck with me ever since and ultimately changed my understanding of modernizing legacy computer systems: “Well, how is the cloud any different from old time-sharing schemes on mainframes?”

Problem 1: Technical Debt

The following situations might warrant modernization:

Love letters. Don’t just tell people you love them. Write them a program that says it Watching tv: every rv show should be a drinking game

Books · Feb 2022

Allen Carr · 56 highlights

There are people who can make love standing on a hammock, but it is not the easiest way.

In fact, one of the many conundrums about smoking is that when we are actually smoking a cigarette, we look at it and wonder why we are doing it. It

Stopping smoking is not the real problem. Every time you put a cigarette out you stop smoking. You may have powerful reasons on day one to say, ‘I do not want to smoke any more’ – all smokers have, every day of their lives, and the reasons are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. The real problem is day two, day ten or day ten thousand, when in a weak moment, an inebriated moment or even a strong moment you have one cigarette, and because it is partly drug addiction you then want another, and suddenly you are a smoker again.

Books · Apr 2023

Levine, Noah · 1 highlight

Active addiction is a kind of hell. It is like being a hungry ghost, wandering through life in constant craving and suffering

Books · Sep 2023

Nick de Semlyen · 17 highlights

A mini-comeback occurred on TV, in the form of Community, the acclaimed sitcom in which he played moist-towelette tycoon Pierce Hawthorne for eighty-three episodes. That experience ended prematurely when, following a long feud with show runner Dan Harmon, his angry voicemails were played by Harmon on his podcast. Community co-star Joel McHale ended up playing Chase, with Chase’s blessing, in 2018’s A Futile and Stupid Gesture, a dramatization of the early days of National Lampoon.

Whether they actually pulled off the Great Cutting-Room Heist is unknown. Either way, the final film pleased nobody

The shoot would have a dual purpose: work and detox. After the madness of the Blues Brothers shoot, Belushi now had a support system in place, including an enormous ex–Secret Service agent named Smokey, to keep drugs away from him, and a karate world champion called Bill “Superfoot” Wallace, to keep his weight down. Instead of bacon double cheeseburgers, Belushi had started gorging himself on tubs of cottage cheese. He quickly dropped fifty pounds. “My mother had always told me that I’d have to suffer if I wanted to look good,” he lamented.

I wish I could do this. I suppose if I want to look good, both physically, and as a thinker, I'll have to suffer a bit?

Supplementals · Sep 2022

Isaac Asimov · 10 highlights

“I am a man of passivity, Golan. I have spent my life doubled over records while waiting for other records to arrive. I do nothing but wait. You are a man of action and you are in deep pain when action is impossible.”

“I have always found in my own work—quite different from yours, of course, but possibly we may generalize—that zeroing in tightly on a particular problem is self-defeating. Why not relax and talk about something else, and your unconscious mind—not laboring under the weight of concentrated thought—may solve the problem for you.”

What counts is that I have discovered the question to ask and a good question is, of course, the key by which infinite answers can be educed.

Supplementals · Sep 2022

Isaac Asimov · 20 highlights

Rules, established with reason and justice, can easily outlive their usefulness as circumstances change, yet can remain in force through inertia. It is then not only right, but useful, to break those rules as a way of advertising the fact that they have become useless—or even actually harmful.”

“You can’t have geniuses and saints without having people far outside the norm, and I don’t see how you can have such things on only one side of the norm. There is bound to be a certain symmetry.

“The radioactivity continued to grow more intense, the population continued to fall, and finally the Empire, in another fit of benevolence, offered to transplant the remnant of the population to a new world of their own—to this world, in short.

Supplementals · Sep 2022

Isaac Asimov · 20 highlights

Remember, to be truly effective, it is not necessary to hold the mind under a tight, controlling barrier which to the intelligent probe is as informative as a naked mentality. Rather, one should cultivate an innocence, an awareness of self, and an unselfconsciousness of self which leaves one nothing to hide.

No matter how the economy and sociology of the neighboring sectors of the Galaxy changed, there was always an elite; and it is always the characteristic of an elite that it possesses leisure as the great reward of its elite-hood.

Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication—but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.

Supplementals · Mar 2022

Isaac Asimov · 20 highlights

“The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.

“Were I to use the wits the good Spirits gave me,” he said, “then I would say this lady cannot exist—for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes.”

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.

Supplementals · Dec 2021

Frank Herbert · 20 highlights

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Isaac Asimov · 10 highlights

Hardin, as he sat at the foot of the table, speculated idly as to just what it was that made physical scientists such poor administrators. It might be merely that they were too used to inflexible fact and far too unused to pliable people.

The psychohistoric trend of a planet-full of people contains a huge inertia. To be changed it must be met with something possessing a similar inertia. Either as many people must be concerned, or if the number of people be relatively small, enormous time for change must be allowed.

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 4 highlights

Vonnegut wants to show that all Billy's material comforts-his magic fingers bed, the expensive jewelry he gives Valencia, his wife, his fancy car (which will be the cause of his wife's death)-can do nothing to smooth over the pain of what he has experienced.

Like Lot's wife in the Bible, mentioned at the end of chapter 1, Vonnegut could not help looking back, despite the danger of being turned metaphorically into a pillar of salt, into an emblem of the death that comes to those who cannot let go of the past.

His secret is of course the awareness of the horrors of war and the certainty of death-an awareness the frantic materialism of postwar America was desperately trying to cover up.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Kurt Vonnegut · 30 highlights

A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.

The last thing you said to me before I got out of the taxicab was that maybe we should get a divorce. I did not realize that life had become that uncomfortable for you. I do realize that I am a very slow realizer.

Eliot’s benefactions covered the full eleemosynary spectrum from a birth control clinic in Detroit to an El Greco for Tampa, Florida. Rosewater dollars fought cancer and mental illness and race prejudice and police brutality and countless other miseries, encouraged college professors to look for truth, bought beauty at any price.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Mary L. Trump · 28 highlights

The media failed to notice that not one member of Donald’s family, apart from his children, his son-in-law, and his current wife said a word in support of him during the entire campaign.

A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma.

As usual with Donald, the story mattered more than the truth, which was easily sacrificed, especially if a lie made the story sound better.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 20 highlights

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are.

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 71 highlights

My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

The flipside, which deserves to be considered as well (in fact it is even more of our concern), is that things that come with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · 20 highlights

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein--more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

"I expected this reception," said the daemon. "All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Jerry Seinfeld · 68 highlights

I still don’t know exactly for sure where jokes come from. I think it’s from some emotional cocktail of boredom, aggression, intense visual acuity and a kind of Silly Putty of the mind that enables you to re-form what you see into what you want it to be.

But for the most part, it was the people who killed themselves to keep coming up with great new material who were able to keep rising through the many levels.

The real problem of stand-up, of course, is that you must constantly justify why you are the only one talking while a room full of people sit quietly.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

James Rickards · 20 highlights

The wealth effect is typically expressed as a percentage increase in consumer spending for each dollar increase in wealth. For example, a $100 billion increase in stock market and housing prices that had a 2 percent wealth effect would produce a $2 billion increase in consumer spending.

Debt used to finance government spending is acceptable when three conditions are met: the benefits of the spending must be greater than the costs, the government spending must be directed at projects the private sector cannot do on its own, and the overall debt level must be sustainable.

Deflation is every central bank’s nemesis because it is difficult to reverse, impossible to tax, and makes sovereign debt unpayable by increasing the real value of debt.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Sam Quinones · 30 highlights

In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.

The morphine molecule exerts an analogous brainwashing on humans, pushing them to act contrary to their self-interest in pursuit of the molecule. Addicts betray loved ones, steal, live under freeways in harsh weather, and run similarly horrific risks to use the molecule.

Overdose deaths involving opiates rose from ten a day in 1999 to one every half hour by 2012. Abuse of prescription painkillers was behind 488,000 emergency room visits in 2011, almost triple the number of seven years before.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Satchin Panda · 20 highlights

If you eat late at night or start breakfast at a wildly different time each morning, you are constantly throwing your body out of sync. Don’t worry, the fix is equally simple: Just set an eating routine and stick to it. Timing is everything.

We now know that to have predictable circadian rhythms is to have healthy organs. Just like a mutation in the genetic code can lead to disease, living in opposition to the circadian code can push us toward disease.

To have a good night’s sleep, we should have our last meal at least 2 to 4 hours before going to bed to ensure that the body is able to cool down.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Haruki Murakami · 20 highlights

I lit up a second cigarette and ordered another whiskey. The second whiskey is always my favorite. From the third on, it no longer has any taste. It’s just something to pour into your stomach.

“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment,” she said, thrusting a skinny back of her hand before my eyes. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”

The problem was that nobody else thought it. It comes down to the different ways in which minds work. What’s over for one person isn’t over for another. But the path splits in two different directions, and so you end up apart.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Yann Martel · 20 highlights

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them—and then they leap.

Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Lois Lowry · 18 highlights

It was the sort of thing one didn’t ask a friend about because it might have fallen into that uncomfortable category of “being different.” Asher took a pill each morning; Jonas did not. Always better, less rude, to talk about things that were the same.

There were only two occasions of release which were not punishment. Release of the elderly, which was a time of celebration for a life well and fully lived; and release of a newchild, which always brought a sense of what-could-we-have-done.

“But sir,” Jonas suggested, “since you have so much power —” The man corrected him. “Honor,” he said firmly. “I have great honor. So will you. But you will find that that is not the same as power.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Michael Lewis · 23 highlights

There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. “Program management” is not just program management. “Program management” is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk.

People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Michael Lewis · 20 highlights

Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.

Can we do this with comedy analogies? Use the first point of analogy to support the irreverence of the last point? Example: Babies are like cigarettes and cigarettes are like grass. Babies are like grass? The babies are greener on the other side

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.

He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Michael Lewis · 20 highlights

“When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off,” he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. “I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off.”

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong.

The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had from turning an investment bank into a public corporation and leveraging its balance sheet with exotic risks, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted, from trust to blind faith.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Kai-Fu Lee · 19 highlights

Combine these three currents—a cultural acceptance of copying, a scarcity mentality, and the willingness to dive into any promising new industry—and you have the psychological foundations of China’s internet ecosystem.

The AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics with an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few companies in China and the United States. This, I believe, is the real underlying threat posed by artificial intelligence: tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping inequality.

Much of the difficult but abstract work of AI research has been done, and it’s now time for entrepreneurs to roll up their sleeves and get down to the dirty work of turning algorithms into sustainable businesses.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Jon Krakauer · 20 highlights

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

Such willful ignorance … amounts to disrespect for the land, and paradoxically demonstrates the same sort of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill—just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Stephen King · 20 highlights

Yet there was always a deadline, a time after which you had to leave the circle, and most writers knew it. If a book remained roadblocked long enough, it began to decay, to fall apart; all the little tricks and illusions started to show.

He discovered three things almost simultaneously, about ten days after having emerged from the dark cloud. The first was that Annie Wilkes had a great deal of Novril (she had, in fact, a great many drugs of all kinds). The second was that he was hooked on Novril. The third was that Annie Wilkes was dangerously crazy.

In the body of the story a juror who asked not to be identified was quoted. “I had very grave doubts as to her innocence, yes. Unfortunately, I had very reasonable doubts as to her guilt. I hope she will be tried again on one of the other counts. Perhaps the prosecution could make a stronger case on one of those.”

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Stephen King · 14 highlights

Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.

It is as if sleep is a pool from which emerging is more difficult than entering.

What you bought, you owned, and what you owned eventually came home to you.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Walter Isaacson · 19 highlights

There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”

He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Johann Hari · 20 highlights

Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.

The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.

They explain that when a popular product is criminalized, it does not disappear. Instead, criminals start to control the supply and sale of the product.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Yuval Noah Harari · 20 highlights

Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

This reliance on the heart might prove to be the Achilles’ heel of liberal democracy. For once somebody (whether in Beijing or in San Francisco) gains the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.

In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Yuval Noah Harari · 20 highlights

The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.

The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call ‘history’.

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

William Golding · 27 highlights

The breaking of the conch and the deaths of Piggy and Simon lay over the island like a vapor. These painted savages would go further and further. Then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never.

Now that his physical voice was silent the inner voice of reason, and other voices too, made themselves heard. Piggy was calling him a kid. Another voice told him not to be a fool; and the darkness and desperate enterprise gave the night a kind of dentist’s chair unreality.

“I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.”

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Malcolm Gladwell · 30 highlights

Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Viktor E. Frankl · 70 highlights

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.

Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 20 highlights

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

George Dyson · 20 highlights

Nature uses digital coding, embodied in strings of DNA, for the storage, replication, modification, and error correction of instructions conveyed from one generation to the next, but relies on analog coding and analog computing, embodied in brains and nervous systems, for real-time intelligence and control.

The differences between analog computing and digital computing are fundamental but not absolute. Analog computation deals with continuous functions, whose values change smoothly over time. Digital computation deals with discrete functions, whose values change in precise increments from one instant to the next.

Leibniz’s third project received no support. Although “so amused that he had looked at the instrument for half an hour,” and even probed it with a pencil to see how it worked, Peter took no further interest in Leibniz’s mechanical computer.4 The powers of digital computing were lost on the tsar.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Suzanne Collins · 20 highlights

All around the dining hall, you can feel the rejuvenating effect that a good meal can bring on. The way it can make people kinder, funnier, more optimistic, and remind them it’s not a mistake to go on living. It’s better than any medicine.

Frankly, our ancestors don’t seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars and the broken planet. Clearly, they didn’t care about what would happen to the people who came after them.

“Panem et Circenses translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.”

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Suzanne Collins · 29 highlights

Life in District 12 isn’t really so different from life in the arena. At some point, you have to stop running and turn around and face whoever wants you dead.

“Having an eye for beauty isn’t the same thing as a weakness,” Peeta points out. “Except possibly when it comes to you.”

“I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now, and live in it forever,” he says.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Suzanne Collins · 18 highlights

In school, they tell us the Capitol was built in a place once called the Rockies. District 12 was in a region known as Appalachia. Even hundreds of years ago, they mined coal here. Which is why our miners have to dig so deep.

He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.

“Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen.”

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Ernest Cline · 16 highlights

“In other words, the ONI allows you to relive moments of other people’s lives. To see the world through their eyes, hear it through their ears, smell it through their nose, taste it with their tongue, and feel it through their skin.”

Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

“Some people define themselves by railing against all of the things they hate, while explaining why everyone else should hate it too. But not me. I prefer to lead with my love—to define myself through joyous yawps of admiration, instead of cynical declarations of disdain.”

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Nicholas A. Christakis · 19 highlights

While COVID-19 patients on average take about seven days from exposure to show symptoms, a meaningful percentage of carriers can spread the disease for two to four days before they are symptomatic.

For SARS-2, however, probably at least 40 percent of the human population worldwide will be infected in the end, and perhaps as much as 60 percent.

To summarize, SARS-1 was ten times deadlier than SARS-2, which in turn is ten times deadlier than the ordinary flu.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

John Brockman · 70 highlights

We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy.

Our ability to simulate the future and to forecast our hedonic reactions to it is seriously flawed, and people are rarely as happy or unhappy as they expect to be.

I suspect that a more free-wheeling, anarchic organization is the secret of our greater capacities of creativity, imagination, thinking outside the box and all that, and the price we pay for it is our susceptibility to obsessions, mental illnesses, delusions, and smaller problems.

government anarchy organization (GAO) has first worldwide summit. Foreword by president chimpanzee. meatball subs for lunch. Art exhibit and hors d’oeuvres and 3PM.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Howard Bloom · 20 highlights

The individual is a cell in the social superorganism. When he feels he is no longer necessary to the larger group, he, too, begins to wither away.

This book will show how the competition between groups can explain the mystery of our self-destructive emotions depression, anxiety, and hopelessness—as well as our ferocious addiction to mythology, scientific theory, ideology, and religion, and our one even more disturbing addiction—to hatred.

We must build a picture of the human soul that works. Not a romantic vision that Nature will take us in her arms and save us from ourselves, but a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there.

Supplementals · Nov 2021

Edwin A. Abbott · 35 highlights

Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.

We hate people who are naturally happy and content. How dare you be okay with marrying the love of your life?!

I do not know. But, if a pick-pocket or a cut-throat of our country can see everything that is in your country, surely that is no reason why the pick-pocket or cut-throat should be accepted by you as a God. this omnividence, as you call it—it is not a common word in Spaceland—does it make you more just, more merciful, less selfish, more loving? Not in the least.

Prometheus up in Spaceland was bound for bringing down fire for mortals, but I—poor Flatland Prometheus—lie here in prison for bringing down nothing to my countrymen. Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.

Books · Jun 2021

James Carse · 5 highlights

We saw that finite players must be selected. While no one is forced to remain a lawyer or a rodeo performer or a kundalini yogi after being selected for these roles, each role is nonetheless surrounded both by ruled restraints and expectations on the part of others. One senses a compulsion to maintain a certain level of performance, because permission to play in these games can be canceled. We cannot do whatever we please and remain lawyers or yogis—and yet we could not be either unless we pleased

This means that during the game all finite play is dramatic, since the outcome is yet unknown. That the outcome is not known is what makes it a true game. The theatricality of finite play has to do with the fact that there is an outcome

Surprise is a crucial element in most finite games. If we are not prepared to meet each of the possible moves of an opponent, our chances of losing are most certainly increased. It is therefore by surprising our opponent that we are most likely to win. Surprise in finite play is the triumph of the past over the future. The Master Player who already knows what moves are to be made has a decisive advantage over the unprepared player who does not yet know what moves will be made

Books · Jun 2021

Harvard Business Review · 1 highlight

Titles include: HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2015 HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2016 HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2017

Books · Apr 2021

Kim Scott · 8 highlights

Prejudiced Beliefs About Child-Rearing

In her forthcoming book Funnier, professor of comedy at Columbia College in Chicago Anne Libera offers evidence that the evolutionary purpose of humor is insight. One person can use humor to help other people notice their mistake, without pissing them off or making them defensive. This is what Libera calls “Ha-ha Ah-ha!”

BEWARE OF THE HERO COMPLEX

Books · Aug 2021

Marc Lewis · 14 highlights

I’m convinced that calling addiction a disease is not only inaccurate, it’s often harmful. Harmful, first of all, to addicts themselves. While shame and guilt may be softened by the disease definition, many addicts simply don’t see themselves as ill, and being coerced into an admission that they have a disease can undermine other—sometimes highly valuable—elements of their self-image and self-esteem

Finally, and most troubling, is the confusion that surrounds AA’s emphasis on recognizing one’s “powerlessness” as a condition for overcoming addiction. For those helped by twelve-step methods, powerlessness is usually viewed as a hinge point for surrendering unworkable strategies and admitting that one has to start over and revamp one’s design for quitting. However, others interpret the emphasis on powerlessness as suggesting ongoing helplessness, perhaps because their thinking has been distorted by submission to a set of impersonal rules imposed by the courts, institutional policies, or overly severe group leaders

addicted lab rats and neural rewiring in human cocaine addicts: clear evidence of brain change. With other drugs the story was sometimes more complicated, but the fundamental message was the same: drug use messes up brain wiring, and the mess doesn’t disappear when you quit. Many of the reported structural changes were related to changes in the release and absorption of dopamine, a neurochemical associated with reward in subcortical systems but with cognitive control in the loftier reaches of the cortex. In study after study, dopamine levels went up and down with drug availability—and not much else. Dopamine was increasingly released by getting high, or by cues that predicted getting high, or by cues that predicted cues that predicted getting high, and decreased in relation to other formerly pleasurable activities like sex, food, and watching your kids grow up. The brain receptors that absorb and use dopamine were also found to change in structure or efficiency over months and years of use.