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The Overachieving Octopus
My morning started simply enough. I finished the crossword I’d fallen asleep working on the night before. I got Wordle in four. I made a cup of coffee and opened the shades to let the sun in. I stood for a moment and noted how its light lined up with the cars on the street.…
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An Exquisite Thread
I was in one of three cramped phone booths in the Chicago office. It was the one with poor circulation, and all I could smell was the orange chicken I had for lunch emanating from my pores. The call dragged on with off-topic interjections. As it stretched past the hour, with a final “while I…
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The Validation Vacuum
“Grade me! Look at me! Evaluate and rank me! I’m good, good, good and, oh, so smart! GRADE ME!” – Lisa Simpson (The Simpsons, “The PTA Disbands”, Season 6 Episode 21) I have a few paragraphs of a new essay typed and already the urge to run my draft-in-progress through ChatGPT tugs on my subconscious.…
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Permission to Play
On losing the joy in work, and giving yourself permission to tinker your way back to it.
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Out of Uniform
Still dressing for a job no one is watching — on office rules, algorithmic style, and figuring out who to be when the room has changed.
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No Hard Stops
On Washington Square Park, Delphi, and why identity rarely resets in one clean break — it layers, like a city built on itself.
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Ground State
A ferry ride from Boston to Provincetown, and a borrowed idea from physics for what it feels like to strip away performance down to your lowest-energy, most essential self.
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Double Take
A misremembered Britney Spears jersey, deepfakes, and why memory needs other people to corroborate it — the feed can’t do that alone.
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Proof of Human
On em dashes, algospeak, and scrubbing your writing of anything that reads as AI — why proof of human might not be about absence but attention.
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Shedding the Canvas
A Wednesday afternoon with Pollock and Duchamp at MoMA, and unlearning the corporate instinct that a day only counts if it produces something.
