According to Readwise, I made 475 highlights this year.
Here are my favourites.
““Have you been anywhere fun lately?” a long-haired man asked me after describing Cancún. “No,” I said, “but I’m just realizing this dynamic I have with my husband where I express my problem so dramatically that I become the problem, which makes me desperate to win back his favor. It’s a cycle that keeps us from ever moving forward with our issues. I think my mom did this, too.” “Sounds like you could use a vacation!””
“For the past few months I’ve followed the trial obsessively, of course I have. Like a spy, a coward, from afar, I’ve collected the snippets of information from every blog, message board, internet site, social media account that had a fact, a half-fact, opinion or conjecture. #Ibelieveher. #shesaslut. All the armchair judges, arguing about which life has been ruined. A man with talent and celebrity and a career on the line. A woman who has nothing, except her word.”
“To be clear, I don’t assume myself to be of riveting fascination to everybody – but if they don’t ask, they’ll never know. There are two good reasons for asking people questions. One is that you might learn something; indeed, it’s pretty much the only way you will. The other is that it makes an impression. People are almost always flattered that someone is taking an interest.
This rule does not apply in the US, however, where total strangers in airport lounges, whether you asked them a question or not, will tell you things that a non-American would not tell a therapist.”
– Monocle, The Monocle Companion: Fifty Ideas for a Better World
“This is what agents do—slip away, disappear, move on to their next assignment. Afterward, those they infiltrated come to believe that this person who showed up out of nowhere and later melted back into nowhere either: (1) fell in love and ran away, (2) had a mental breakdown, or (3) was a cop all along.”
– Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
“The problem with dystopias is that dystopias are easy. You simply stop giving a shit about things or people that you should give a shit about, or things that don’t affect you directly, thinking they’re somebody else’s problem and boom—shit starts getting dystopian real quick. Dystopia is basically entropy playing out to its natural conclusion. Add a few unethical dipshits, give them unlimited money to build data centers, and we can get there by Tuesday.”
– Mike Monteiro’s Good News, How to Stay Hopeful
“That is all to say: Movement helps. Building strength, skill, and mobility in the muscles surrounding the knee joint helps even more. Do whatever you like with your knees, squat or don’t, it is no skin off my or anyone’s back. But the science has agreed for a long time that avoiding movements just because they hurt is, at this point, a very old-school approach. Having bad knees does not *necessarily* mean you need a specialized lifting program, or need to avoid squats, or cannot use weights.”
– She’s A Beast, Squats, Pain, Your Knees, and You
“Other emotions—anger, fear, contentment—are deep enough to snorkel in, and if you keep swimming around in them, you’ll find all sorts of bizarre creatures that dwell in the depths and demand description. Bitterness, on the other hand, is three inches of brackish water. Nothing lives in it. You can stand in it and see the bottom.”
– Adam Mastroianni, 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing
“When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.”
– John Gruber, ★ Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
“If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.”
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