Welcome ✦✧
This is a newsletter about trying to live a meaningful, intellectually engaged, self-actualized life. It’s about how to take your intellectual, artistic, and literary aspirations seriously—especially when you’re no longer in school or academia but have an urgent, unstoppable desire to keep on learning, making, and growing.
And it’s also about how genuinely fun it is to read an amazing book and discuss it with others!
Each week, I’ll write posts about:
Great contemporary literature and essays—I love Annie Ernaux, Olga Ravn, Ben Lerner, and Olivia Laing
Older, canonical works—this year I’m reading Pierre Bourdieu and (re)reading Marcel Proust
Design trends and beautifully designed objects
How to apply ideas from philosophy, critical theory, sociology, and art history to everyday life
And here and there I’ll offer a few lukewarm-to-hot takes on gender, culture, technology, society, and human relations.
What does “personal canon” mean? ✦✧
Everyone has their own personal, idiosyncratic, highly subjective, sense of their own canon—the things they will return to for the rest of their lives, the things that shaped them, the things that reward renewed attention, looking, reading, listening, experiencing. I’m always interested in what that canon is for others—and I love talking about what my own canonical works are!
Who are you? ✦✧
I’m a designer and writer living in San Francisco, and previously spent 4 years in London. I have a very interdisciplinary background (computer science and design in undergrad, design history for my MA), so many of the posts here will jump between topics—modernist literature, book cover design, web-based art, and amateur investigations into sociology and philosophy.
I also write literary and design criticism:
On Vietnamese modern architecture and climate change for the modernist #44
On Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries for ArtReview
…and some other work:
6 book recommendations for novels and memoirs with beautiful, sensory language for The Atlantic
A roundtable discussion on museums and climate activism in the Reiminagining Museums for Climate Action book
