Photo by Julia Zyablova on Unsplash I've been following the New Creative Era podcast since Yancey and Josh started broadcasting it. I can't say I agree with them on everything, but they definitely have an honest take on being an artist in the US during late-stage capitalism. They talk a lot about how artists should get paid better, and with that I totally agree. Yancey's project is the A-corp: a legal framework in which artists can register as A-corp and then they can sell sh

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash I read Margo's Got Money Trouble and the comparison I immediately thought about was The L-Shaped Room. In both novels, the protagonist gets accidentally pregnant and decides to keep the baby despite most men in her life discouraging her. Margo lives in 2020s USA while Jane lives in 1950s UK, but the ways these two women are marginalised are strikingly similar. On the surface, both women are shamed for getting pregnant outside of marriage. Jane

Photo by TopSphere Media on Unsplash I'm reading Margo's Got Money Trouble, and she has some fantastic metaphors. They make me envious, obviously, but also they got me thinking about why I love a good metaphor. A good metaphor distills what I love about books. It lets me see the world, for a moment, from someone else's perspective. Not just to see what they do, but to see how they see the world, how they feel. The last good metaphor I marked was "The walls were painted teal a

Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash I watched Reality last week. It’s a film about Reality Winner, an NSA contractor who leaked a classified document to a news website. The film makes a distinct choice: it uses only recordings. Mainly, it’s the recording of the FBI interviewing Reality in her home, but there are some news broadcast recordings, and a recording of a phone call she made to her sister from jail. Reality's story opens up a host of questions that would be worth explori

My new Sakura Notebook. It makes me happy. I started a new notebook today. It’s a gorgeous Moleskine I got in Milan, the Sakura edition. As you would expect from Moleskine, the paper quality is outstanding, and the attention to detail is quite something (there are two ribbon markers, each a different shade of pink to match the design). There’s even a little bookmark with sales copy about “The Art of Capturing Fleeting Beauty”. It says: “…Pen and paper are the best way to capt

Photo by Christian Kielberg on Unsplash The other day, I went on a research trip for my new book. It was a sunny day, and I walked around a London neighbourhood, looking at houses. Then, I sat on a park bench and eavesdropped on conversations. I sat down at a café for lunch. I watched the people and listened in on their (rather loud) conversations, then watched the owner come in on his bike. I watched him as he put some music on, checked the kitchen had everything they neede

Photo by Joey Jacob on Unsplash I’ve been playing with Tarot cards recently, and I noticed that asking the right question is surprisingly difficult. We come to the cards wanting answers, but we haven’t quite formulated the question yet. So at the beginning of the session, before we even touch the deck, there’s already some work happening. It connects, for me, to my academic research. In academic research, half the work is figuring out how to ask a question that, if answered,

Photo by Igordoon Primus on Unsplash I watched Broken Glass at The Young Vic last week. The way the auditorium is set up makes you a part of the play, not merely an observer. Case in point: in the climax when Phillip collapses and the rest are standing around laughing, I had a strong urge to run over and help him up. It makes us feel compassionate towards someone who isn’t easy to feel compassionate towards. Then we get to go home feeling like heroes. We totally would have h

Photo by peter bucks on Unsplash I’ve come across the phrase “late bloomer” a few times recently, and I noticed I resisted it. I was an early bloomer, or what is more often called a precocious child. I had my first existential crisis when I was five. I can still remember crying in bed, my mum trying to figure out what I could possibly have to cry about. I was thinking that evening about how my grandfather died and how my parents will die someday, and I’ll be left alone, and

Photo by Djim Loic on Unsplash After writing the piece Curiosity, Taxed , I felt that maybe it was too clean. Sometimes the voice that tells me to keep writing rather than follow this curiosity spark down a rabbit hole is actually right. Sometimes what I need to do is to keep writing. But I still firmly believe that sometimes I need to fall down the rabbit hole. So how do I tell which is which? Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer for that. When I follow the curiosity t

Photo by Eijat Darus on Unsplash I’m taking a course called Creative Systems , and one of the things Kening Zhu talks about is resources and our relationship to them. She names the most obvious ones—time, energy, attention, inspiration—but she says a lot of things can be resources. When I heard that, the thought that hit me was: I’m rich in curiosity. It’s not just a trait, it’s the driver of much of my work. Here’s what usually happens. I hear something or read something. I

Photo by Andreas Haimerl on Unsplash Everyone says listen to your body. It's the (not so) new fad in the wellness industry. Your body knows best. The assumption is that our bodies hold all the wisdom, and we have to shut up and take it. Which, don't get me wrong, I understand how we ended up here. For much too long, women's bodies in particular have been silenced and disbelieved. Especially if there's pain, or, heaven forbid, hormones involved. But in the same way that my bo

POST CONTAINS SPOILERS Sure, there are heists and gangsters and a spectacular, public revenge. But in crime novels, mysteries are always solved. Not necessarily by a detective who gets the bad guy, but by the reader understanding what happened and why. None of the mysteries in Harlem Shuffle gets solved. One mystery is a lapse. Three mysteries in a row? That’s on purpose. In the first act, we see Miami Joe betray the crew. Why has he betrayed the crew? We don’t know. We don’

Photo by Takemaru Hirai on Unsplash To all intents and purposes, I'm a collector. I collect quotes in various places, fragments of beautiful sentences, random thoughts and ideas. I collect books I want to read and TV shows and movies I want to watch. I have a whole section on my website called Collections (you're in it right now). A while ago, I was reading Empireland (a rough read but such an important book), and I noted that the British Empire is, among other things, disti

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash For much of my life, my automatic cognitive stance was black-and-white thinking. If something annoyed me, it was bad, and everything around it was awful. If someone said something that hurt my feelings, I'd break off contact and never speak to them again. Today, I was reflecting that I think that's no longer the case. In fact, I think my automatic stance became seeing both sides. I was thinking about the British Library and how, on th

Photo by Emilipothèse on Unsplash I was listening to Ezra Klein interviewing Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, and he said something that is both insane and makes perfect sense at the same time. He said: "...when you start to train these systems to carry out actions in the world, they really do begin to see themselves as distinct in the world... But along with seeing oneself as distinct from the world seems to come the rise of what you might think of as a conception of

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash Today I'm thinking about the word taboo. In Hebrew, the same word has two meanings: the first is a legal property term, derived from the Turkish word tapu , meaning proof of ownership of a property (a land or part of it). A registration in the taboo, in Hebrew, means the land is legally yours. The second meaning of the word comes from Polynesian and means sacred or forbidden . I was sure these two meanings came from the same word, but t

Photo by Aedrian Salazar on Unsplash Today I'm thinking about the futility of making art. David Speed (excellent podcast , highly recommend) says that all the artists he talked to say that you just need to keep making things. Which is decent advice, I guess. But he doesn't interview the thousands of people who kept making things their whole lives and stayed obscure; no one ever heard of them, and only very few people even engaged with their work. It's not that I intend to st

Photo by Sepp Rutz on Unsplash When I started the collections, I was super excited and couldn't see this rather predictable slump coming. On many days, I feel like I don't have anything interesting to contribute. Today, for example, I feel like a dilettante--there are no consequences for my success, so really I'm just dabbling in writing, surely. Then I say, well, if I don't have anything interesting to contribute, then I'm just making noise, and the internet already has qui

Photo by Shunya Koide on Unsplash The world is shit. Every post I’ve read lately opens with that. Heck, every conversation I’ve had eventually lands here. And I get why. There are wars at a rate unprecedented since before WWII, floods and famine ravage vast areas of the globe, and there’s a worrying trend towards authoritarianism, as if we learned nothing from history . The sheer magnitude of these problems can lead anyone to despair and apathy. What can one person do in the