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"The Rehearsal," Nathan Fielder’s strange and odyssean project on HBO, is a show about vulnerability. Or, really, how to avoid it. If we go back to the beginning of "The Rehearsal,” Fielder tells us why he’s making this show. The first words spoken on the
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Wassily Kandinsky spent a lot of time thinking about how to be weird. The Russian painter, whose best-known work is a bunch of sloppy concentric circles, was as much an academic as he was an artist. He believed strongly in the ability of abstraction to represent human emotions more credibly
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The safest emotional space in the world for me is my four-person group chat where we are viciously critical and form factions against one another while debating the dumbest concepts ever invented by mankind. “Staff Infection,” a group chat that started five years ago over Twitter direct messages before migrating
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Protesting — public demonstrations, large and small — is the language of my own political dissent. I learned how to protest as an adult at Occupy Oakland, a radical and regularly violent protest against inequality. Protesting in Oakland was the best education I could have received in collective action. I was radicalized
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A few years ago, I purchased an audiobook copy of “Codependent No More,” a seminal self-help book written in the 1980s. This book, written by Melody Beattie, introduced the concept of “codependent relationships” to the mainstream and gave the term its first real definition. “A codependent person is one who
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Speaking as a filthy maximalist who wears a Brian Eno hat more days than not, my opinion is that music is one thing the minimalists got right. I don’t have the expertise to criticize ambient and contemporary classical music with nuance, but it has become an increasingly meaningful part
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As a person who works in the creative realm, everyone in my life is obsessed with generative artificial intelligence and the many ways this overall unrefined product could harm the people who rely on it — and the bosses who want to replace us with it. Count me amongst them. My
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Twice a day for two years, Sarah Langs drank a bitter, brown sludge-like concoction that she called “her potion” in the hopes that it would extend her life by at least a few weeks. Sarah has ALS, a condition that is causing her body to rapidly calcify itself. The potion
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I started this Substack five months ago with no plan other than to have a space to “write whatever I want.” I didn’t do a big packaged launch that established it as its own publication, and I did not (and still do not) plan on making it my primary
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When you gain a certain level of prominence on the internet, you really learn about the diversity of human behavior. There’s your creeps, your good-faith operators, your pedants, your sycophants, your douchebags — you meet them all out there, usually all of them every single day. But there is one
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1/9 When I permanently deleted my Twitter account, there were nearly 100,000 people and bots following me. A whole random mid-sized American city had at one point elected to subscribe to my thoughts and links to my news articles. 2/9 A website that had consumed and allowed
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The earliest iteration of my social life in New York City is now a relic of its time. On weeknights and some weekends, writer and editor types from a variety of fields — bloggers, social media editors, journalists, book authors and other publishing types — would congregate at the Housing Works bookstore