Jerry Seinfeld co-created the most successful show in the history of television, and after nine seasons they offered him $110 million to do one more season—and he said no. Years later, Howard Stern asked him why he didn’t accept the offer, and his answer was beautiful: The love affair between the people that were making … Read more
One of the great musical collaborations of recent times had quite a funny origin. Sting and Dominic Miller created incredible songs together, including Fields of Gold, and Shape Of My Heart. But Miller almost screwed it up. He was a musician in London at the time, and got invited to audition with Sting, who at … Read more
Many of Mozart’s piano pieces tend to be to pleasantly rippling along. I imagine them very befitting for the salons of Viennese aristocracy, where life is easy and privileged. But his Piano Sonata No. 11 in A Major, played by Fazil Say is wonderful. It still has that Mozart-feel, but there’s a dynamism to it, … Read more
I like spending hours in bookstores, surrounded by the aroma of aged paper and ink, hovering around, reading different books, and I think that’s in general a pretty cool thing. However, there’s a weakness I have which I dislike about myself: my penchant for scouring through the bargain bin of a book store. Recently, I … Read more
For most of my life, I’ve been someone who works in bouts of inspiration. When I’m on, I’m really on. When I’m not, I’m completely gone. This has it’s good sides and bad sites: but some things just require consistency over long periods of time. Something I didn’t possess. And so eventually I asked myself: … Read more
Paul Auster. Neil Gaiman. David Foster Wallace. Susan Sontag. J.K. Rowling. James Patterson. They all wrote longhand. (And of course all the greats of literature that lived before the invention of the typewriter in the 19th century.) As the world changed, so did the way we communicate. What was once done in longhand writing with … Read more
The Machine Stops by Edward Morgan Forster is a short story published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909. What’s most amazing to me is imaginging what prompted him to write this story in those days. This “meditation” of his, as he calls it, predicts with almost eerie accuracy some developments which seem to … Read more
Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art has been so influential to my life and my pursuit of prolific practice, that I naturally went down a Pressfield rabbit hole, reading nearly everything written by the man himself, a lot written about him, and watched dozens of interviews. The more I learned about him, the more … Read more
A friendship journal? That sounds like something little girls do, in a pink pretty notebook full of unicorn and rainbow stickers. But what about two grown people. Two men at that. Different story. Judgment, judgment, judgment. A cynical voice in my head that tells me this is a dumb idea. But that’s exactly why I … Read more
Steven Pressfield shares some advice for young writers who are struggling to find their voice in his book Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: I was trying to find a voice. Trying to find my voice. Was I really a “writer?” No. Was what I was doing “writing.” No. I was trying to save my … Read more