#essays

A virtue of concrete writing is that it causes a distinct mental sensation.

Is wordiness inherently bad?

Even though Spotify categorizes it as a podcast, Random Tape is something else.

Here’s an example of coordinated metaphors, something I wish other writers used more often.

Learning to pick between productive and absorptive activities based on my current mood and energy level has helped me notice, for example, when I should try to write instead of reading.

Can you trust someone who denies that their subsconsious plays a major role in their life?

A not-so-secret desire of mine is to write non-fiction professionally.

I read half of The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer’s gargantuan, Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction novel about Gary Gilmore – and figured I could put it down and move on.

Take this quote by anthropologist Clifford Geertz:

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.

This morning I almost got overwhelmed with things I had to do. Like when you set your glass down too hard and the wave rises to the rim menacingly.

Freud, apparently, thought dreams prevented us from going crazy.

Several years ago, in the last and lightest semester of my Computer Science degree, I spent a good deal of my free time studying YouTube videos about politics, philosophy, and sociology.

Suppose you have this sentence:

It leads us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future

I find it surprisingly easy to whistle a new tune.

The idea is that, through sheer thought, you can mobilize a body sapped of motivation.

It is old advice to live now because now is the only time you will ever live. Embrace this moment because it is the only one in reach.

Writing The Virtual Book forced me to ask: when is writing the best medium?

It’s important to keep your metaphors from bumping into one another.

As you will have noticed, the essays on this site are all titled “how to X”, but are not guides as much as blog entries. “How to” is just a rhetorical device, an invitation to approach a subject.

Once, when I was a Teaching Assistant for a 3rd year Computer Science course, I had to invigilate a couple students while they took a midterm.

Everyone should learn to leave books unfinished.

Ever since I read How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, I’ve stopped trying to absorb everything I read.

I read with haste, crazed by the amount of content I won’t get to unless I hurry.

The other day I picked a bunch of books from my library and tried to start each of them.

Death is coming.

There is a ridiculous amount of content out there.

Right now, it’s 5:28pm. I just finished my work day.

Decades ago, The New Yorker and other magazines experimented with the journalistic form by introducing literary techniques into it.

As satisfying as it was to hear Herbie narrate the stories in his audiobook, it was frustrating to never hear his music.

A modern torchbearer of Thompson’s immersion journalism is comedian-journalist Andrew Callaghan.

The first song of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi is hard to describe.

When I do work and I get stuck I leave my desk and wander down the hallway.

Does the brain control you, or are you controlling the brain? I don’t know if I’m in charge of mine.

Despite all my admiration and enchantment while reading Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast I couldn’t help but frowning at his writing mantra: “make instead of describing”. Surely he’s been describing all along?

Starting a new book is exciting.