As I walk through cities nowadays I try to look through a Jane Jacobian lens at the diversity of enterprise and use about. By use, Jacobs literally means the uses buildings provide: living, working, commerce, diversion, to name some of the main ones. Nowadays it’s easy to take for granted mixed-use buildings, but they exist because the city planning orthodoxy of today – which Jacobs influenced through her writing and activism – makes space for them.

Mixing of uses is only one of the ingredients that Jacobs argues districts must employ to generate lively and diverse city life. Another one is short blocks, to allow foot traffic from adjacent streets. On a recent walk, I noticed how much was packed onto one side of a short city block on one of the lively stretches of East Hastings in East Vancouver. A gym offering luxury fight goods and apparel, a plant shop, a laundry service business, a kitchen renovation business, a small counterservice cafe offering “Italian street food”, a nail studio, a print shop, a beauty salon, a travel agency, an importer’s office, a Vietnamese restaurant, and a hip diner. Most of these on the ground level of a three-storey residential building occupying much of the block. On the corner past the diner a vacant lot recently bulldozed in preparation for a four-storey mixed-use residential building.

A fifteen minute walk away begins the vibrant stretch of Commercial Drive, one of the liveliest areas of East Vancouver. Near its north tip, for example, there’s a gallery, a secondhand clothing shop, a shop for local art, and a coworking space, all in the same building and all apparently run by the same collective, which hosts events including stand up comedy nights and craft workshops in the gallery and coworking space.

Diversity is possible in cities, Jane Jacobs explains, because they bring together people in quantities so great that critical mass can be reached for projects and enterprises that can’t survive in sparser and less diverse communities. But for diversity to flourish and thrive, cities must create and maintain four key conditions: mixing of use, short blocks, buildings of varying age, and population density.

Karl Pilkington sounds foolish, but he’s onto something. He tells an anecdote about a time when he finished his grocery list and moved on only to be interrupted by a thought that entered his mind suddenly: Apple.

The thought of apple just appeared and Karl doesn’t know how. It fell like a raindrop into his mind. This happens to us all the time, but we don’t notice it because we expect it. We think What’s his name again? and then something inside us slips an answer into our grasp: Mark. It’s like shaking a tree until fruit falls out. We don’t give the tree much credit. But Karl was leaving the orchard when the apple came rolling after him.

We talk about the subconscious as a mysterious engine that runs the dreams we soon forget after we wake up. But it’s also there in the day. It hums along softly in the background, chiming in helpfully when we need to remember someone’s name or what produce to buy.

But it’s more than our assistant. It’s our advisor, our consigliere. It’s the source of our gut feelings. Great ideas come from interaction with this humble inner partner, this invisible thinker.

Despite being teased by his buddies for his story about the apple, Karl echoed something the French polymath Poincaré wrote in his essay, Mathematical Creation:

Like Karl, Poincaré tells stories of answers coming to him when he was no longer considering the question. And he welcomes it. He recognizes his subconscious mind as a vital actor in his work, a shrewd associate that finds a fresh lead while he rests.

Poincaré then concludes something that Karl would’ve been mocked for saying: resting is productive. Not because it reenergizes you for more work, but because it is work. Rest releases the invisible thinker to explore and find what you haven’t noticed yet. You can feel this happening in the shower when novel ideas surface in your mind without prompt. And though we can’t steer our “ambient thought”, we can tell it what to think about. As Don Draper of Mad Men tells his protégé:

Our train of thought springs into existence already in motion and it speeds between ideas connected by tracks in our mind. Though we cannot access the underlying web of knowledge directly, we experience the result of its traversal. And by training and ruminating on new ideas we integrate them into the network. This is why jazz musicians can fling out new melodies every night. A chord change played by the backing band illuminates melodic pathways carved into the musician’s mind during training. At the gig they just get behind their instrument and go for a ride.

We tap into these networks not only for spontaneous improvisation but also for careful design. We draw from a well of memories and impressions, questions and conclusions, recreating and appropriating them for new purposes. A musician composes from real feelings, from their desires and their fears. A fiction writer sketches a character from the outlines of real people, from the beauties they’ve admired and faults they’ve despised.

This personal reservoir is where filmmaker David Lynch fishes for the strange and abstract ideas that appear in his work. In his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, Lynch describes his process more as catching ideas than creating them. He receives ideas from something inside himself, and consults this inner source to develop and implement them.

Lynch isn’t the only prolific artist with a mysterious inner partner. Novelist Cormac McCarthy is well aware of his own collaborator. He said:

Like Poincaré and Pilkington, McCarthy has talked about the mysterious experience of receiving answers from the ether:

McCarthy often talks about the Night Shift, the period when we sleep and the invisible thinker takes over. Pilkington agrees – from his book The Moaning of Life:

The invisible thinker rules this hidden world where our creativity lives. It collaborates with us to devise and improvise, and it even thinks for itself. When relieved from its duty as our advisor, it roams freely, eager to satisfy its own curiosity. We heighten our creative potential when we deepen understanding with our internal agent. Especially if we don’t just ask but also listen.

Highly recommend to anyone interested in reading about time management. This book has a radical message for you: give up hope. You’re never going to finish. Relearn what it means to spend your time well. You have very little of it and your anxiety about not wasting it is founded on bad assumptions and impossible standards.

I’d rate this book higher if I had learned more from it. I’ve thought lots about time management.

Sometimes I feel like Burkeman allows himself doubtful claims, but his ideas are interesting and useful nonetheless. His writing is good, but

.

I enjoyed his anecdotes and references to other works. The idea of pre-clock life blew my mind. I hadn’t thought about the relationship between clocks, time, industrialization, and wage-labor. A great example of fundamental paradigms we don’t question. Pure ideology!

Starting a new book is exciting. It’s like putting on a brand new pair of shoes on a sunny morning, with no puddles in sight. Sadly, the novelty wears off. Then, there’s that uncomfortable feeling at the prospect of leaving the book unfinished. The same book that starts as an exciting little activity becomes a nagging reminder that you failed to reach a goal.

Nobody likes starting a book and failing to finish it. So much so, I suspect, that it discourages us from starting a new one, in fear of not reaching the end. After all, who signs up for a marathon that they don’t expect to finish? Even if you ran an impressive 20 miles, you wouldn’t get the exhilaration of crossing the finish line and the satisfaction of officially achieving a commendable, well-defined goal that other people recognize and admire.

But is reading a book really about reading every single page that someone put between two covers? On principle, I think people would agree reading is about getting exposed to ideas that inform and influence the way we think. Surely, then, we can be done with a book regardless of whether we read it from beginning to end. And if we’ve “finished” the book in this way, shouldn’t we walk away satisfied and guilt-free?

Setting a goal number of books to read can foster the habit of reading regularly, a habit we all admire and covet. However, it’s easy to get carried away with trying to make measurable progress at the expense of approaching your actual goal. If you get fixated on officially finishing a book, you might be forgetting why you wanted to read it in the first place. By ditching a book when you feel you’ve had enough of it, you’re staying true to the real reason you set that goal of reading some special number of books by Christmas time.

In Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, the authors tell a true story about a government that offered civilians bounty for killing rats in an effort to mitigate the local rat infestation. Specifically, they offered people money for each rat tail they brought in. They figured they could reliably track progress on the pest problem without having to handle the corpses. The plan backfired completely. Crafty entrepreneurs realized that they could capture a rat, cut off its tail, and then release it, so that it would live on to reproduce: more rats, more tails, more money. The pest problem worsened significantly.

But why all the gossip about rodents and dishonest bounty hunters? Well, Weinberg and McCann’s point is that metrics can be counterproductive. In the case of reading books, if you worry too much about how many books you’ve read front-to-back, you stray from your objective of learning and growing. Maybe you should change your metric or add a new one: the number of books checked out of the library, or the number of books you read for at least one hour. Anything that helps you make real progress and not counting rat tails.

Books aren’t perfect. Many of them are good. Many others are just okay. Sometimes, you benefit by leaving a book unfinished and moving on to another instead of persevering through to the end, regardless of how far you’ve made it. In that case, by quitting the book, you’re overriding a psychological flaw and making a more rational choice.

The sunk-cost fallacy, as defined in Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman is:

We fall prey to this error when we stick stubbornly with a book just because of the time we’ve already sunk into it. If this book is no longer doing it for you, move on. There are millions of other books and many of them are better than this one. If you can cut your losses and push through the unpleasantness that comes with doing so, you’ve likely made the optimal choice.

If you feel guilty about not finishing a book you’re currently reading, you probably won’t start a new book. And so, if the book you’re reading loses your interest, you’ll end up losing steam and maybe reading no book at all. Unless it is important to you to finish this specific book, why not move on and keep your momentum going? By leaving a book unfinished and feeling good about it, you allow yourself to start a new book with excitement instead of guilt.

We’ve all finished reading a paragraph only to realize that we didn’t absorb much of the information at all. It can happen when we’re having trouble focusing, but it can also happen when you’ve lost interest. That’s okay. It might be time to move on. Life is long, you can come back to this book in some weeks, months, or even years if it’s a book you think is worth reading eventually. By moving on, you are valuing results above all else.

If you learn to ditch books with confidence, you’ll cover more variety of material. I think this is true not only because you start the next book sooner, but also because you avoid the reading slump you’ll inevitably hit when you’ve committed to a book that you have no interest in reading. By moving on to another book, you’re covering more ground when it isn’t worth staying put and drilling down for more.

You might benefit a lot from a book early on, but less so in later chapters. Perhaps you’ve effectively satisfied your curiosity, or maybe the book’s value is distributed unevenly across its sections. Regardless, you’re facing diminishing returns and the book might not be worth your time anymore. By ditching the book, you’re reacting intelligently to a waning profit.

If we choose to finish a book, let’s make that choice for a good reason, and not because leaving it unfinished feels like failure. Moreover, let’s relish the opportunity to make the smart, if counterintuitive, choice of bailing on a book when it isn’t worth the time. If we overcome the mental hurdles that stop us from ditching a book even when we are justified, we’ll be free to read more widely and engage more deeply.

During the week that Z & I were there, we saw friends, shopped, attended comedy & jazz shows, visited museums, drank lots of coffee, ate lots of pizza, walked, biked, rode the subway, took the ferry, and wondered where in the city we might want to live.

Despite having arrived at the Airbnb at 9pm, tired after a long day of travel from Seattle, it was easy to have an eventful first night. Within walking distance of the airbnb were plenty of bars, coffee shops, restaurants, convenience stores, and even a small comedy club.

Also within walking distance of the airbnb were subway stations for the J, L, A, & C lines, which made it easy to get around Brooklyn and into Manhattan on the two days following.

The Village Vanguard was well worth visiting. Not only is it a historic jazz venue, but their minimum purchase is just one drink. Kurt Rosenwinkel and his band were great.

Especially compared with the noisiness and grittiness of Bushwick, Fort Greene and Park Slope’s tree-lined streets and brownstones were stunning. The affluence of this part of Brooklyn is obvious. Its peace and prettiness, however, comes at the cost of Bushwick’s personality.

Astoria is not stunning to look at, but certainly more handsome than Bushwick. It is also, apparently, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world, with a particularly strong Greek presence. English comprised only a modest share of the languages we overheard people speaking in the area. This excerpt, from Jan Morris’s splendid ode to the wild vibrancy of Manhattan (1979), rang true:

There wasn’t as much to see in Astoria’s center as I anticipated. Shopping in SoHo, on the other hand, impressed me. The Highline was as pretty and as busy as I remember it. Bowery has some good spots.

The ferry was great. Cheap, easy, and quiet. The views were great and various. In FiDi I was shocked at the quantity of tourists. We only went there because it was the ferry’s terminus, but it was interesting to see it after reading Jane Jacobs’s critique of it in

and The New Yorker’s recent article about the conversion of Wall Street office towers into apartment buildings.

The Lower East Side was charming, and it was memorable to eat outside on Bond Street, but the food was pricey. Wicked, the Broadway show, was as good as I remember it being when I saw it fifteen years ago. At night we explored Astoria some more, but still did not feel inspired by it.

Revisited INFINITEA and sat again at the table on the sidewalk, looking out on to the street. It was a delightful way to start the day, and I repeated again for the next two days. I’m glad I went to the MoMA while Z & Coco went to the Met. I love walking around museums alone, listening to my music. This time it occurred to me to leave after a couple hours, have a meal, a coffee, and come back. I think I’ll be adding that to my museum routine. Several restaurants in the area give a discount if you show them your MoMA ticket.

Compared to the Village Vanguard, the

was a bit embarrassing. Afterwards, walking through Greenwich Village at night, I felt like I was in an amusement park – the heat, the neon signs, people in every direction walking and talking, going into and out of venues, bars and restaurants spilling out onto sidewalk patios. We got cocktails and then slices to go. It was a quiet thrill.

I had no intention of shopping during the trip, but I found great stuff in SoHo. As a kid, soccer jerseys comprised

and in my eyes they still hold a special allure.

Our last day was unexpectedly memorable. We walked up through Ditmars Steinway and took Citi Bikes to Astoria Park and rode them along the water. We liked it so much that we looped around and did it again before heading back for our bags to go to the airport.

I found Ditmars Steinway charming enough that I wondered if we might look for apartments there if we ever move to New York. It seems to strike a great balance between peacefulness and liveliness. I’m sure many New Yorkers would scoff or snort if I suggested it is an accessible location, but in its center is the Astoria-Ditmars Blvd station, from which runs the N through Astoria, into and all the way down Manhattan, into Brooklyn and all the way through to Coney Island. Bushwick, however, is not on that path, and would be painful to reach. Looking at the subway map, it’s clear the routes were designed primarily for commute in and out of Manhattan.

There is a ridiculous amount of content out there. The diligence we demand of ourselves to finish the book we’re reading is ridiculous too, when you consider how many other books are out there waiting, and how arbitrarily or impulsively you chose this book in the first place.

Am I the only one that neglects their collection of unread books and picks instead a new one from the library or the bookstore?

I’ve learned to sample books, try them without committing, abandon them, plunge into them if they beckon me. I have ideas of where I want to go but also an aversion to planning, so I rely on

to choose the next step.

Starting a new book is exciting. It’s like putting on a brand new pair of shoes on a sunny morning, with no puddles in sight. Sadly, the novelty wears off. Then, there’s that uncomfortable feeling at the prospect of leaving the book unfinished. The same book that starts as an exciting little activity becomes a nagging reminder that you failed to reach a goal.

Nobody likes starting a book and failing to finish it. So much so, I suspect, that it discourages us from starting a new one, in fear of not reaching the end. After all, who signs up for a marathon that they don’t expect to finish? Even if you ran an impressive 20 miles, you wouldn’t get the exhilaration of crossing the finish line and the satisfaction of officially achieving a commendable, well-defined goal that other people recognize and admire.

But is reading a book really about reading every single page that someone put between two covers? On principle, I think people would agree reading is about getting exposed to ideas that inform and influence the way we think. Surely, then, we can be done with a book regardless of whether we read it from beginning to end. And if we’ve “finished” the book in this way, shouldn’t we walk away satisfied and guilt-free?

Setting a goal number of books to read can foster the habit of reading regularly, a habit we all admire and covet. However, it’s easy to get carried away with trying to make measurable progress at the expense of approaching your actual goal. If you get fixated on officially finishing a book, you might be forgetting why you wanted to read it in the first place. By ditching a book when you feel you’ve had enough of it, you’re staying true to the real reason you set that goal of reading some special number of books by Christmas time.

In Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, the authors tell a true story about a government that offered civilians bounty for killing rats in an effort to mitigate the local rat infestation. Specifically, they offered people money for each rat tail they brought in. They figured they could reliably track progress on the pest problem without having to handle the corpses. The plan backfired completely. Crafty entrepreneurs realized that they could capture a rat, cut off its tail, and then release it, so that it would live on to reproduce: more rats, more tails, more money. The pest problem worsened significantly.

But why all the gossip about rodents and dishonest bounty hunters? Well, Weinberg and McCann’s point is that metrics can be counterproductive. In the case of reading books, if you worry too much about how many books you’ve read front-to-back, you stray from your objective of learning and growing. Maybe you should change your metric or add a new one: the number of books checked out of the library, or the number of books you read for at least one hour. Anything that helps you make real progress and not counting rat tails.

Books aren’t perfect. Many of them are good. Many others are just okay. Sometimes, you benefit by leaving a book unfinished and moving on to another instead of persevering through to the end, regardless of how far you’ve made it. In that case, by quitting the book, you’re overriding a psychological flaw and making a more rational choice.

The sunk-cost fallacy, as defined in Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman is:

We fall prey to this error when we stick stubbornly with a book just because of the time we’ve already sunk into it. If this book is no longer doing it for you, move on. There are millions of other books and many of them are better than this one. If you can cut your losses and push through the unpleasantness that comes with doing so, you’ve likely made the optimal choice.

If you feel guilty about not finishing a book you’re currently reading, you probably won’t start a new book. And so, if the book you’re reading loses your interest, you’ll end up losing steam and maybe reading no book at all. Unless it is important to you to finish this specific book, why not move on and keep your momentum going? By leaving a book unfinished and feeling good about it, you allow yourself to start a new book with excitement instead of guilt.

We’ve all finished reading a paragraph only to realize that we didn’t absorb much of the information at all. It can happen when we’re having trouble focusing, but it can also happen when you’ve lost interest. That’s okay. It might be time to move on. Life is long, you can come back to this book in some weeks, months, or even years if it’s a book you think is worth reading eventually. By moving on, you are valuing results above all else.

If you learn to ditch books with confidence, you’ll cover more variety of material. I think this is true not only because you start the next book sooner, but also because you avoid the reading slump you’ll inevitably hit when you’ve committed to a book that you have no interest in reading. By moving on to another book, you’re covering more ground when it isn’t worth staying put and drilling down for more.

You might benefit a lot from a book early on, but less so in later chapters. Perhaps you’ve effectively satisfied your curiosity, or maybe the book’s value is distributed unevenly across its sections. Regardless, you’re facing diminishing returns and the book might not be worth your time anymore. By ditching the book, you’re reacting intelligently to a waning profit.

If we choose to finish a book, let’s make that choice for a good reason, and not because leaving it unfinished feels like failure. Moreover, let’s relish the opportunity to make the smart, if counterintuitive, choice of bailing on a book when it isn’t worth the time. If we overcome the mental hurdles that stop us from ditching a book even when we are justified, we’ll be free to read more widely and engage more deeply.

As someone who likes to think and learn about psychology on my free time, here is my understanding of ego.

Ego is a constructed (and therefore false) self that we all build to protect ourselves (our real, raw selves). Therefore, failing to de-identify with your ego is a failure to

.

But why is ego a false self? Does construction really imply falsehood?

Maybe a more precise distinction is constructed self (ego) v.s. authentic self (real self).

What’s so bad about ego, anyway? Isn’t it just one’s sense of self worth?

I don’t see ego simply as my sense of self worth. I see ego as a set of beliefs about myself that serve to sustain my feelings of worth, security, adequacy, and such. These beliefs rely on fantasy because their purpose is not to be true, but to be useful. The more desperate I am to compensate for feelings of insecurity, worthlessness, and inadequacy, the more I need to fantasize about myself and thus the bigger my ego gets, and the more I must insulate myself from reality to protect my fantasies from crumbling. This insulation is an artificial layer that exists to isolate us from reality and allows us to tamper with evidence on its way into our conscious awareness. The antidote that halts pollution of the self, the liberator that frees the self from this hijacker, is facing one’s fears and insecurities.

Another way to the think of an ego is as a process that does two main things: one, it seeks and feeds on things that your authentic self needs in order to quell fears and insecurities, and, two, it dismisses, ignores, and denies things that stimulate fears and insecurities. Your authentic self and your ego are in a co-dependent relationship. Your ego has too far in “helping” you, and it’s actually enabling self-destructive behavior.

Are you saying that all egos are self-protection mechanisms?

If you have no insecurities to compensate for, why do you need your ego?

Can you trust someone who denies that their subsconsious plays a major role in their life? A good reason to deny your subsconscious is fear of what it contains.

An ego is like a mask that smooths over blemishes and hardens the sensitive spots. It is a tool and a burden. Some egos are so big that they become difficult to remove or distinguish from one’s actual self. If you can’t unmask in private, with a loved one or by yourself, do you still exist? Are you alive?

A big ego is like a great shield that blocks out all – insults, criticism, connection, love, truth. Underneath the shield is a self too fearful to exist. A big ego houses despair and another secret: self-hatred.

Dissociating from your ego allows you to uncover your fears and your stifled self. But before you separate from your ego, you must believe you can exist without it. You must have courage. And you must want to exist without it. You must want integrity.

A person who claims to have an insignificant subsconscious is either a liar or a person of great integrity. And what are the odds that one has no internal conflicts awaiting resolution?

Compared to The Village Vanguard, The Blue Note was a bit embarrassing. Doors open two hours before showtime, giving guests ample time to meet their $20 minimum. Accordingly, we showed up with plenty of time to have dinner before the show. However, after we wriggled and hopscotched into seats at the claustrophobically crammed tables, we found out that the main dishes themselves – and even some appetizers – start at $20 and reach comfortably past the upper $30s. (As I write this and look on The Blue Note’s website to check my memory, I notice the online menu omits the prices.) With more than an hour until showtime, we decided Z and Coco would go out for food elsewhere in Greenwich Village and I would stay and have dinner there.

A few minutes before showtime, I went upstairs to the bathroom and stumbled upon a gift shop because of course they had a gift shop. On the way back to my seat, I overheard a conversation at the till. Your total is $75. After a short silence, during which, I presume, the customer looked down at the two items on the counter, blinked, and looked back up: How much is each item?

At least the show was good. The drummer, who apparently tours with Alicia Keys, was amazing. Gleefully he battered the kit with urgency unabating as if he were Tom and the groove Jerry. Between songs, Terrace took his time telling stories and teasing his bandmates. Halfway through the set, he announced his guest, whose name might not ring many bells, but has been inscribed on several Grammies for cowriting hits like Bruno Mars’s That’s What I Like and Justin Timberlake’s Pusher Love Girl. For two people in the audience the name rang not a bell but a gong, and when Terrace hesitated during the introduction, one of them cried out The GOAT! Terrace nodded and confirmed, the GOAT… James Fauntleroy! Out shuffled a man befitting his all-but-pop-star status: a short, chubby man wearing thick-framed glasses, a hawaiian shirt, and striped jogging pants.

One of our intentions for visiting NYC was to test our interest in moving there. It’s easy to fantasize, but would we actually like living there? And if so, where, in particular?

For the first three nights, Z and I stayed in an Airbnb in the southern corner of Bushwick, between Broadway and Bushwick Ave. It was obvious immediately that the area would be far too noisy for our dog, Baxter. He is generally frightened by noise and would be reduced to a quivering lump by the thunder and shriek of the subway that runs above Broadway.

The location was great for our trip, though. Within walking distance we had plenty of bars, coffee shops, restaurants, convenience stores, and even a small comedy club. It was easy to have an eventful first night despite having arrived at the Airbnb at 9pm, tired after a long day of travel from Seattle. Also within walking distance were subway stations for the J, L, A, & C lines, which made it easy to get around Brooklyn and into Manhattan on the two days following.

Bushwick, according to my friend who lives there, is the hip, artsy neighborhood that Williamsburg was ten years ago, before it fell into the sterilizing grasp of corporations. Bushwick is gentrifying though, and walking east to west through the heart of the neighborhood you can see the process unfolding.

On Saturday afternoon we came up out of Myrtle-Wyckoff station onto a small pedestrian strip crowded with carts and market stalls selling a variety of Latin American street food to Latino families. We’d left the noise of the L underground, but on street level cars honked, music blared, people called and chattered, and the M ran overhead. As we walked west on Knickerbocker Ave towards Maria Hernandez Park, we started noticing trendy-looking delis among the Mexican and Central American restaurants, and the unmistakable presence of young, white tote-carriers like us.

Despite this, the neighborhood looked no less gritty and industrial. Until the sudden sign of corporate investment. It announced itself when we wandered into the “Shops at the Loom,” in the form of a semi-deserted lobby furnished with tufted leather chairs that looked brand new, or at least unused. The lobby made no more sense the farther walked into the building, past several closed offices and a surprising lack of shops. We tried the door to a vintage clothing store, but it was locked. Finally we came to a cafe where a young woman was singing and playing acoustic guitar. It was occuppied sparsely and mostly by people that seemed to know the singer. In the corner opposite the counter was a table of free kombucha and “elixirs,” attended distractedly by one of the artsy entourage. I couldn’t spot an exit to the street. Had everyone come in through the lobby and down the winding hallway?

It felt, as corporate-subsidized spaces often do, like a fake place, a place designed remotely from a real estate office rather than one developed and maintained by people that spend time there. A cursory internet search confirms it. The building belongs to Bushburg:

Or, in fewer words, gentrifiers incorporated.

Ventures like these feel the ickiest because their sole aim is, literally, to capitalize on a place. And it shows in the lifelessness of the spaces they create, which neither exist for the people that inhabit them nor belong to them. They offer what they must in order to extract value efficiently, and no more. Why would they? These places don’t have to be meaningful to anybody, they just have to perform as an economic resource.

Less than a mile from where I live in Seattle is South Lake Union, a prime example of a city district too smothered by corporate investment to have life. It’s a disheartening place to be in. But at least escape is possible on foot. Bellevue, a quasi-city on the other side of Lake Washington, is even worse. Its skyscrapers suggest citylife but amount to little more than vertical suburbs with convenient access to corporate offices and a high-end mall. The entire place feels manufactured.

It’s easy to oppose and despise this aspect of gentrification, but what about the aspects that attract people like me? Places that I love, too, are responsible for driving up the cost of living in the areas they inhabit. Near the Loom in Bushwick are two places now among my favorites in New York: SEY Coffee and Roberta’s. And while these places are wonderful and, I think, worthy contributions to the local culture, they are also catalysts for the displacement of locals, a necessary step in the process of making space for people who can and want to pay more to live in the area. People like me.

In fact, it is precisely corporate real estate companies that make it feasible for an influx of people like me to settle in the area. (Work in progress / to be continued)

This novel is like a long, restless dream about a man paralyzed by his guilt and his grief. Along one plotline tension builds, but then neither resolves nor dissipates completely. It remains an anonymous threat hanging over the protagonist’s head, a darkling mystery suspended, never precipitating. It’s a confounding book, and one that I would be thrilled to see adapted into film by David Lynch.

It is never clear who is after the protagonist, Bobby, or why. It seems at first related to his presence at a suspicious scene in a sunken airplane, which he encountered while working as a salvage diver. Later, it seems that anonymous authorities are after his father’s old papers. Mysterious men pay periodic visits and ask questions. Some of Bobby’s belongings are stolen. His cat disappears. His car get confiscated. The persecution seems operated through the US government, but it’s carried out obliquely and underhandedly.

Regardless, Bobby lives his life as if in penance. He is stuck in limbo, confined by his apparent ambivalence towards life, which has him constantly approaching and evading danger, all the while awaiting his death. He camps out for a while in a shed near a deserted beach. When his stalkers seem to be closing in, he flees from New Orleans to Idaho and squats in a derelict house in the freezing cold. In the end, he settles in the southern coast of Spain, holed up in a windmill with a crumbling roof. In the quiet of these exiles, without the comfort of shared food, drink, and conversation, the pitch of his grief reaches shrieking, hallucinatory levels, setting the stage for quasi-spiritual moments of revelation.

The most potent aspect of this book is probably its mood, which reflects the hopeless remorse that Bobby feels. Remorse for the unholy devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that his father and mother helped engineer. Regret for his helplessness before the great mysteries of mathematics and physical science. In these Bobby seems to bear the burden not just for himself and his family, but for all of humanity. Principally, however, Bobby’s remorse and grief are for his inability to prevent his sister’s suicide and their inability to enact the deep, incestuous love between them.

Throughout the book, Cormac depicts Bobby’s agonizing internal conflict regarding his feelings for his sister. Here, from page 184, is one of the most memorable:

The prose is a major reason I keep picking up books written by McCarthy. Who else

?

Here, from pages 115 and 116, is another striking example of McCarthy’s prose – a description of the scenes following the dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan:

McCarthy doesn’t make it clear what “truth” the mushroom cloud embodied, but it is certainly not a comforting one.

Later, on pages 175 and 176, he describes a factory where uranium was prepared for the bombs:

That last sentence is exquisitely crafted. A tremendously vivid scene realized in fifty eight words assembled fluidly without any interrupting punctuation.

I’m 120 pages into this book and so far it has consisted purely of dialogue between a psychiatrist and a patient who has voluntarily checked herself in. Dialogue between these two I expect will fill the rest of the book. It’s an exciting endeavor to witness Cormac attempt.

He published this book alongside

in 2022 as a “companion novel” known also as The Passenger #2. I tried this one first though because among its topics are math and philosophy. It is set chronologically after The Passenger, but my impression, assembled from fragments of scantily skimmed book summaries, is that reading them in either order is fine.

(Even more than novel summaries I avoid movie trailers. They reveal far too much. I’d be happy to watch them if instead of crudely summarizing the story and undermining its telling they showed a short sample of the movie. A scene at most and no more.)

This book is clearly a product of the years Cormac spent at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in conversation with scientists and researchers discussing consciousness, mathematics, physics, language, and philosophy. Much of what the protagonist Alicia says – about the unconscious, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, mathematics – Cormac himself says in conversation with SFI’s President David Krakauer in this interview from 2017. The interview is good companion material to the companion novel.

This book reminds me of another, which I intend to return to when I finish this one: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, in which a philosopher lying on her deathbed argues with her friend against the likelihood of an afterlife. In Stella Maris death also looms – not just over the protagonist but also its author. Cormac died six months after this final publication.

In her New Yorker article about suspense, Kathryn Schulz uses a clever image to describe how suspense exists at many scales.

Her choice of the word fractal conjures, for me at least, the kaleidoscopic image of triangles within triangles within triangles, ad infinitum. She then applies the image onto her subject, suspense in storytelling, which is a neat way to depict it as occuring at scales spanning from large to minute.

There is one wrinkle, though. The word fostered. It’s not the right word. How does one foster a fractal? I suppose one can foster suspense, but that’s not a particularly strong match either. Regardless, we are in the middle of likening suspense to fractals, so whatever word we choose should coordinate with the image of fractals, or at least not clash with it.

Some alternatives to fostered that come to mind are replicated, recreated, reproduced, repeated. But a simple applied will serve as well:

Not as fancy as fostered, but more precise, I think.

During the week that Z & I were there, we saw friends, shopped, attended comedy & jazz shows, visited museums, drank lots of coffee, ate lots of pizza, walked, biked, rode the subway, took the ferry, and wondered where in the city we might want to live.

Despite having arrived at the Airbnb at 9pm, tired after a long day of travel from Seattle, it was easy to have an eventful first night. Within walking distance of the airbnb were plenty of bars, coffee shops, restaurants, convenience stores, and even a small comedy club.

Also within walking distance of the airbnb were subway stations for the J, L, A, & C lines, which made it easy to get around Brooklyn and into Manhattan on the two days following.

The Village Vanguard was well worth visiting. Not only is it a historic jazz venue, but their minimum purchase is just one drink. Kurt Rosenwinkel and his band were great.

Especially compared with the noisiness and grittiness of Bushwick, Fort Greene and Park Slope’s tree-lined streets and brownstones were stunning. The affluence of this part of Brooklyn is obvious. Its peace and prettiness, however, comes at the cost of Bushwick’s personality.

Astoria is not stunning to look at, but certainly more handsome than Bushwick. It is also, apparently, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world, with a particularly strong Greek presence. English comprised only a modest share of the languages we overheard people speaking in the area. This excerpt, from Jan Morris’s splendid ode to the wild vibrancy of Manhattan (1979), rang true:

There wasn’t as much to see in Astoria’s center as I anticipated. Shopping in SoHo, on the other hand, impressed me. The Highline was as pretty and as busy as I remember it. Bowery has some good spots.

The ferry was great. Cheap, easy, and quiet. The views were great and various. In FiDi I was shocked at the quantity of tourists. We only went there because it was the ferry’s terminus, but it was interesting to see it after reading Jane Jacobs’s critique of it in

and The New Yorker’s recent article about the conversion of Wall Street office towers into apartment buildings.

The Lower East Side was charming, and it was memorable to eat outside on Bond Street, but the food was pricey. Wicked, the Broadway show, was as good as I remember it being when I saw it fifteen years ago. At night we explored Astoria some more, but still did not feel inspired by it.

Revisited INFINITEA and sat again at the table on the sidewalk, looking out on to the street. It was a delightful way to start the day, and I repeated again for the next two days. I’m glad I went to the MoMA while Z & Coco went to the Met. I love walking around museums alone, listening to my music. This time it occurred to me to leave after a couple hours, have a meal, a coffee, and come back. I think I’ll be adding that to my museum routine. Several restaurants in the area give a discount if you show them your MoMA ticket.

Compared to the Village Vanguard, the

was a bit embarrassing. Afterwards, walking through Greenwich Village at night, I felt like I was in an amusement park – the heat, the neon signs, people in every direction walking and talking, going into and out of venues, bars and restaurants spilling out onto sidewalk patios. We got cocktails and then slices to go. It was a quiet thrill.

I had no intention of shopping during the trip, but I found great stuff in SoHo. As a kid, soccer jerseys comprised

and in my eyes they still hold a special allure.

Our last day was unexpectedly memorable. We walked up through Ditmars Steinway and took Citi Bikes to Astoria Park and rode them along the water. We liked it so much that we looped around and did it again before heading back for our bags to go to the airport.

I found Ditmars Steinway charming enough that I wondered if we might look for apartments there if we ever move to New York. It seems to strike a great balance between peacefulness and liveliness. I’m sure many New Yorkers would scoff or snort if I suggested it is an accessible location, but in its center is the Astoria-Ditmars Blvd station, from which runs the N through Astoria, into and all the way down Manhattan, into Brooklyn and all the way through to Coney Island. Bushwick, however, is not on that path, and would be painful to reach. Looking at the subway map, it’s clear the routes were designed primarily for commute in and out of Manhattan.

Compared to The Village Vanguard, The Blue Note was a bit embarrassing. Doors open two hours before showtime, giving guests ample time to meet their $20 minimum. Accordingly, we showed up with plenty of time to have dinner before the show. However, after we wriggled and hopscotched into seats at the claustrophobically crammed tables, we found out that the main dishes themselves – and even some appetizers – start at $20 and reach comfortably past the upper $30s. (As I write this and look on The Blue Note’s website to check my memory, I notice the online menu omits the prices.) With more than an hour until showtime, we decided Z and Coco would go out for food elsewhere in Greenwich Village and I would stay and have dinner there.

A few minutes before showtime, I went upstairs to the bathroom and stumbled upon a gift shop because of course they had a gift shop. On the way back to my seat, I overheard a conversation at the till. Your total is $75. After a short silence, during which, I presume, the customer looked down at the two items on the counter, blinked, and looked back up: How much is each item?

At least the show was good. The drummer, who apparently tours with Alicia Keys, was amazing. Gleefully he battered the kit with urgency unabating as if he were Tom and the groove Jerry. Between songs, Terrace took his time telling stories and teasing his bandmates. Halfway through the set, he announced his guest, whose name might not ring many bells, but has been inscribed on several Grammies for cowriting hits like Bruno Mars’s That’s What I Like and Justin Timberlake’s Pusher Love Girl. For two people in the audience the name rang not a bell but a gong, and when Terrace hesitated during the introduction, one of them cried out The GOAT! Terrace nodded and confirmed, the GOAT… James Fauntleroy! Out shuffled a man befitting his all-but-pop-star status: a short, chubby man wearing thick-framed glasses, a hawaiian shirt, and striped jogging pants.

In

I posted my first /now update and since then I have posted three more. This new practice has had a couple of nice side effects.

It has encouraged me to review the “What’s Next?” section to see what intentions I had a month or two prior. It’s easy to forget. If it doesn’t reorient me to worthy goals, it amuses me to notice the bias of my intentions at the time I wrote my update.

The self-imposed task of writing periodic “now” updates has also encouraged me to write about seemingly mundane events like a weekend trip to the

. I’ve come to love vignettes like these, and have found joy in their realization from ordinary life. This is one of the outcomes of my

to New Journalism.

I want to be intentional and careful with how I approach writing on this site. I caught myself fretting about posting unrefined pieces like

and

and wondering whether tweaking and updating them retroactively was cheating. No no no. Part of my vision for this site, this writing project, is that it not unconsciously inherit the

. This writing project is digital, and thus can be reshaped and rewritten in totality with little effort.

If I choose to tweak, fix, gut, trash, or transform a piece, it’s not only ok, it’s the point.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term. By virtual book I mean a book unbound by the traditional and physical constraints of printed books. I say ‘virtual’ because the greatest possibilities I see are in the virtual world of computers. Ebooks and audiobooks are just the beginning. The possibilities that excite me challenge not only the physicality of books but also their more subtle attributes.

A virtual book can be multimedia. It can consist of words, images, video, audio. There, we got the obvious one out of the way.

A virtual book can be readerdriven. Instead of forcing readers to follow the author’s thought process, a virtual book can let each reader steer the way. Wikipedia does this already. It lets you search the page for keywords, skip to the section you’re interested in, and even escape into a tangential topic, never to return. This is a natural way to consume Wikipedia because its form affords it.

Books generally have one start and one ending, but a virtual book can be nonlinear. Wikipedia is again the obvious example. But letting the reader drive is only one way to create a nonlinear book. It’s also possible to create multiple entrypoints, or even multiple endings, like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

A virtual book can be dynamic. It can change after its initial creation. Printed books, on the other hand, are static snapshots laboriously rendered by a particular author at a particular time. But what if a theory is debunked? Or a hypothesis confirmed? Or a record shattered? Or, in the case of storytelling, what if a loose end can be tied up neatly?

A virtual book can be nonmonolithic. It does not need to be discrete or selfcontained. It can consist of many interconnected parts that make up the whole but can exist without it. It can reference other virtual books, borrow bits from them, and lend bits of its own. For example, if Herbie Hancock’s memoir was a virtual audiobook, it could allow its snippets to be reconstrued into a documentary about jazz. (If Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series was also ‘virtualized’, it could have been updated 15 years after its release to include bits of Herbie’s narration.) In fact, it could provide material for documentaries about many different topics: jazz, funk, hip hop, Miles Davis, Black Nationalism, Nichiren Buddhism, meditation, and crack addictions, to name some of the obvious ones.

A virtual book can be responsive. What if a reader could expect a book to field spontaneous questions? ChatGPT is an obvious candidate here, but the possibility is broader. What if Herbie Hancock returned to his memoir every now and then to answer questions that readers had left behind while reading it? What if readers could raise flags on issues that factcheckers would then verify or return to the author for amendment?

The possibilities are plenty, and they are thrilling. The difficulty in realizating them is not technological, but legal and political. Powerful companies – and therefore governments – are hugely incentivized to prevent the free exchange of “intellectual property”. To make virtual books possible, we need not only the technological power of software, but also its progressive politics.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term. By virtual book I mean a book unbound by the traditional and physical constraints of printed books. I say ‘virtual’ because the greatest possibilities I see are in the virtual world of computers. Ebooks and audiobooks are just the beginning. The possibilities that excite me challenge not only the physicality of books but also their more subtle attributes.

A virtual book can be multimedia. It can consist of words, images, video, audio. There, we got the obvious one out of the way.

A virtual book can be readerdriven. Instead of forcing readers to follow the author’s thought process, a virtual book can let each reader steer the way. Wikipedia does this already. It lets you search the page for keywords, skip to the section you’re interested in, and even escape into a tangential topic, never to return. This is a natural way to consume Wikipedia because its form affords it.

Books generally have one start and one ending, but a virtual book can be nonlinear. Wikipedia is again the obvious example. But letting the reader drive is only one way to create a nonlinear book. It’s also possible to create multiple entrypoints, or even multiple endings, like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

A virtual book can be dynamic. It can change after its initial creation. Printed books, on the other hand, are static snapshots laboriously rendered by a particular author at a particular time. But what if a theory is debunked? Or a hypothesis confirmed? Or a record shattered? Or, in the case of storytelling, what if a loose end can be tied up neatly?

A virtual book can be nonmonolithic. It does not need to be discrete or selfcontained. It can consist of many interconnected parts that make up the whole but can exist without it. It can reference other virtual books, borrow bits from them, and lend bits of its own. For example, if Herbie Hancock’s memoir was a virtual audiobook, it could allow its snippets to be reconstrued into a documentary about jazz. (If Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series was also ‘virtualized’, it could have been updated 15 years after its release to include bits of Herbie’s narration.) In fact, it could provide material for documentaries about many different topics: jazz, funk, hip hop, Miles Davis, Black Nationalism, Nichiren Buddhism, meditation, and crack addictions, to name some of the obvious ones.

A virtual book can be responsive. What if a reader could expect a book to field spontaneous questions? ChatGPT is an obvious candidate here, but the possibility is broader. What if Herbie Hancock returned to his memoir every now and then to answer questions that readers had left behind while reading it? What if readers could raise flags on issues that factcheckers would then verify or return to the author for amendment?

The possibilities are plenty, and they are thrilling. The difficulty in realizating them is not technological, but legal and political. Powerful companies – and therefore governments – are hugely incentivized to prevent the free exchange of “intellectual property”. To make virtual books possible, we need not only the technological power of software, but also its progressive politics.

Can quantifying the attributes of a TV show tell us something about its quality? I reckon some of the flaws in House of the Dragon would be reflected in statistics like amount of dialogue per minute and number of decisions made per character. A non-negligible amount of time is spent on dramatic montages and orchestral music that create a moody atmosphere and remind us of how serious the situation is. This comes at the cost of time that could be spent on actual situations and actual drama, or at least character development that would contribute to future drama.

These two elements – dialogue and decision-making – each give us an independent perspective into a character, but their combination is especially powerful because it gives us a third angle: insight into what a character is thinking, including what they are thinking unconsciously. From this we get what might be the critical ingredient of great story-telling: three-dimensional characters.

My qualm with shows like House of the Dragon is that their plot feels designed and implemented. I sense the presence of writers and their attempts to show me what’s happening and persuade me that it makes sense. I can’t get lost in the fictional world as if it were a real one because I see the pencil marks from when it was sketched out. My suspension of disbelief never takes off. One might say, Well, yeah, all fictional plots are prescribed. But they’re not, and writers like Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy have attested to it.

In great shows like The Sopranos, plot is not implemented, it’s incubated. The show feels to me like it’s happening spontaneously, developing by itself as a sequence of events, reactions, and actions. In every episode there is constant dialogue between characters and a steady supply of situations that require characters to make decisions. And much of the time, these have nothing to do with plot. Every season has at least one major narrative arc, but the dependence is flipped. Episodes don’t depend on an overarching plot for their meaning. Episodes generate the plot. Characters are agents, not passengers. I don’t feel like the writers are leading me to the plot’s predetermined destination. In fact I don’t feel their presence at all. I feel like I’m witnessing something.