A few months ago, someone emailed asking to interview me about my writing routine. His name was Hao. He runs a publication called Famous Writing Routines. I said sure.
I’m publishing this interview because it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever accidentally said about writing. I don’t know what it felt like for Hao, but he never published it. So here it is: Read more
Almost everyone is mistyped where it matters most. Not in a fun, abstract way — in the exact place that’s holding them back.
When you’re mistyped, you build a life around the wrong assumptions. You try to fix the wrong problems. You expect the wrong things from the people you love. It’s subtle, which is why even people who have studied type for years get it wrong. I wrote about personality type for a decade and still mistyped people I was closest to.
So I’m having live personality type office hours for paid subscribers. Read more
detail of Blue-Yellow-Red from Colorfields (1974) by Gerhard Richter
This past week I culled the email list of people who recently took my personality type test. I had to sort through a lot of snippy emails that a filter won’t decide on. Example:
First name: poop
Last name: poop
First name: I don’t
Last name: Give a fuck
My mom recently mailed me a stack of magazines from my first job as a columnist. As I was flipping through them I saw something I hadn’t realized at the time: the magazine was rewriting who I was.
You can see it happening on the pages. My bio changes. The illustrations change. The column itself changes. At one point, after I had the baby, the managing editor told me I should start writing for women’s magazines. In another issue my bio calls me a “former” executive, as if my career were already over.
At the time I didn’t notice any of it. Now I can’t unsee it. So I’ve laid out the pages along with what I see now when I read them. Read more
Most people don’t mistype strangers. They mistype the people they love.
That’s what I realized after years of using personality type in parenting, partnerships, and work. I knew all the frameworks, but I still got my family members wrong over and over again. The problem wasn’t the system. The problem was that I was emotionally invested in the wrong version of them.
This is one of the biggest weaknesses of personality typing: it only works if you’re honest with yourself, and most of us aren’t. When we’re close to someone, we don’t type them based on how they see the world. We type them based on how they make us feel. Read more
Cover art for Judge magazine (1924) by Holmgren
1. Find a NYT subscriber. They can gift a free subscription to one person. Be that one.
2. Start with WORDLE. It teaches you to figure out the word without using a clue. Now you won’t be scared of puzzles about curling rules or KPOP girls.
3. Do the mini crossword. It’s so small that when you have to get a hint – like just show me the damn word – the puzzle is finished before you can start feeling the weight of the cheat.
4. Learn these otherwise useless words that come up all the time: do is bread; epee is a sword; oahu, kauai, lanai are Hawaiian Islands; ella, ani, etta, enya are musicians.
5. Wait for a day when you wake up tortured by the super important thing at the top of your to-do list that you must do or your life will be ruined.
Push that thought to the back of your head by adjusting the pillow under your neck for optimum position for all day in bed. Take your ADHD medicine because first of all it’s in arm’s reach, but also, people with drive don’t skip meds on very important days. And this is your full-puzzle day.
If you have to answer the phone, say, “Is this urgent? I’m on the other line.” When the bathroom calls you, bring the puzzle — a proven method of puzzle mavens. Pause to memorize the greek letters because now it feels like cheating to google them.
Don’t eat except for chips in between clues. Don’t even stand up to get crumbs off the sheets. You are too busy. Move from the Monday archive to the the Friday archive. You are unstoppable.
Doze off thinking about a four-letter word with Z in the middle. Wake up when a pop up reminds you about that to-do list item. Turn off alerts. You do not need that to-do list because you’re saving your life by becoming a crossword 🔲 🔲 🔲.
There are two kinds of reading comprehension questions.
The first has a right answer. You read a passage, you find the information, you match it to the option that fits. These are multiple choice questions. They test whether you can locate and recognize a correct answer inside a text. They reward pattern detection and results correlate strongly with IQ. Read more
My oldest kid sent me an email with the subject line: “DO NOT LET Z SEE THIS EMAIL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES OR I WILL KILL YOU AND HIM.”
She was telling me she’s trans.
When she was really young she wore girl clothes. I went with it for a while. We have pictures of her in a tutu. At Target she insisted we shop in the girls’ section. But around age five we said that’s enough. And she said okay. Read more
Levittown, NY, a post-WWII suburban single-family sprawl
Gen Z is conservative. Not culturally, but in how they respond to collapse. They grew up inside system collapse—financial crisis, institutional failure, pandemic, climate instability—and they’re responding the way post-crisis generations always do: by seeking constraint. Read more
Ghislaine Maxwell and her father, Robert Maxwell
We clamor for the release of Epstein’s emails, but we already know what they’ll show: powerful men sexually abuse girls. What we’re avoiding is this: the U.S. government trafficked children as an intelligence operation, and we—the electorate—have spent two decades protecting everyone who made that possible. Read more