Pushing and pulling

10 things worth sharing this week

“I think a lot about the difference between what in my head is the push internet and the pull internet... the internet where things are pushed at you and the internet where you have to do some work… you have to pull it towards you.”
—Ezra Klein

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth pushing at you this week:

1. “Write down the albums you like. Google the artists who you like. Read about their biographies. Maybe follow them on Instagram. Maybe see what else they’re thinking about and reading and who they’re listening to. Or if you like an author, read who they are reading and follow the web of connections that they build.” Kyle Chayka on how to discover your own taste. (He’s on tour and doing the rounds for his new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.)
   
   

2. Two of Chayka’s favorite books are favorites of mine: Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows and Laurence Weschler’s Seeing Is Forgetting The Name of the Thing One Sees.
   
   

3. “Comedy—broadly, historically—is the art of taking serious things not seriously.” I had a hunch I was going to like Jesse David Fox’s Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes it Work the minute I saw the Kierkegaard and Joan Rivers epigraphs, but when he quoted Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, I knew I was all in. I look forward to listening to his podcast about jokes, Good One. (His ideas about play and comedy line up nicely with The Comedy of Survival.)
   
   

4. On the asshole who lives in our brains: “Were we to meet this figure socially, this accusatory character, this internal critic, this unrelenting fault-finder, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him, that he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout, of some catastrophe. And we would be right.” That’s Adam Phillips in his wonderful essay, “Against Self-Criticism.” (Collected in his book, Unforbidden Pleasures.)
   
   

5. “We are poor indeed if we are only sane.” I went back and skimmed and skipped through Adam Phillips’ first book, Winnicott, after listening to this 2011 conversation between cartoonists Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel in which they spoke in depth about D.W. Winnicott’s influence on their work. (I re-read Lynda’s favorite, Playing and Reality, earlier this summer.) I’m also re-reading Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? in which she uses Winnicott’s ideas to structure a memoir about her relationship with her mother. (If you’ve never read her, start with Fun Home.)
   
   

6. I’m a white elder millennial dad, so I could not resist this ranking of Radiohead albums and solo projects. I’ll always love the early stuff, but these days I’m particularly fond of In Rainbows, The Smile’s “Smoke,” and Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack for Phantom Thread. (I cranked Amnesiac while writing this, and it hits harder than I remembered!) The Smile’s new record is out next week.
   
   

7. I was delighted by how many of you enjoyed my letter of gardening metaphors for creative work and all the cool stuff you sent me, like how you can literally compost old books. (And grow mushrooms on them.)
   
   

8. “Q: When is the best time to plant a fruit tree? A: Five years ago.” That’s an old gardener joke from Manjula Martin’s conversation with Cheryl Strayed about her new book, The Last Fire Season. (Cheryl and I were both interviewed in Manjula’s book Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living.)
   
   

9. “Be tired in the first place.” Tom Hodgkinson on how to sleep well.
   
   

10. Your assignment this week: More pull, less push. More search, less feed.

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xoxo,

Austin

photo: @rosshatton