avitalbalwit.com

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer By Walt Whitman When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the a…

I was in the Musée d'Orsay in 2016 and I was hopelessly sad.

On Hyper-Optimized Content, Memetic Viruses, and the Theft of the Self I have had the uncanny experience of opening Pinterest lately and finding, amidst the tiles on wedding aesthetics and garden design, lurid short videos playing automatically.

Goya's The Madhouse Every week, I bike through the worst neighborhood of San Francisco and then get into the manual elevator at the historic, decaying building that holds my ballet studio.

I feel profoundly American when I travel to Germany.

This is the post I wish someone had sent me as a freshman in college.

One common reaction to this is that it will lead to a less meaningful life; that without struggle some essential form of human striving will have been lost.

Increasing complexity requires increasing delegation.

But it was also worth it because of a piece of advice I received — Anders would tell us again and again: “Go hard to go easy.”

“a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent..." - Middlemarch, Chapter 3

I met someone recently who was a passionate supporter of online ads.

This pattern made me think about idea generation more broadly, the pace at which different people produce good, novel ideas, and how we migh

I now use Claude every day, multiple times a day, both in my work and personal life.

In conversation with Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America.

The London Review of Books just published my Letter to the Editor.