Hi friends,

We just wrapped up our 10th cohort of Write of Passage, which means summer is officially here. My schedule is almost entirely empty for the next few months, so I can focus on creative work. I'm planning to write a few monster essays and finally launch the How I Write podcast. And who knows? This might be the time to start writing a book about online writing and the opportunity it presents.

We're launching a new product too: Writing Sprints.

These sprints are a workout class for your mind. They’ll have the energy of SoulCycle, the variety of CrossFit, the intensity of Barry’s, and the camaraderie of a Spartan Race. As your instructor, I’ll guide you from Zero to Published on a piece of writing — in just one day.

The first Sprints will run on Saturday, June 10, and Friday, June 23. Enrollment is now open. Click the button below to if you want to join.

Friday Finds

Maybe the World’s Most Influential Intellectual: If you’ve never heard of Wang Huning, it’s time to change that. As one of Xi Jinping’s closest advisors and arguably China’s leading ideological theorist. In Chinese literature, his position is known as dishi, which translates to “Emperor’s Teacher.” For 20 years, he’s predicted that America will decline because of nihilism and hyper-individualism — both of which have led to skyrocketing inequality, the dissolution of the family, and the utter destruction of the nation's heritage. This piece offers an introduction to his ideas, while this piece dives into the man himself.

​David Foster Wallace, on Consumerism: Few people understand modern American culture like David Foster Wallace did. In particular, he saw how young people in the upper-middle class lived sad and empty internal lives, even though their external ones were defined by tremendous comfort. One of his more interesting observations is the absence of silence in modern life. We listen to music when we’re on our computers, move through our homes with TV in the background, and insist on playing pop music at our restaurants. What’s going on there? This interview is interesting beyond Wallace's ideas. It's also a revealing window into his psyche: his fears, his insecurities, and the trepidation he feels about telling the truth.

​Relax for the Same Result: Our hustle culture encourages us to work more and try harder, but it's worth asking when this advice falls flat. I got to thinking about this when a friend texted me about two Spartan Races he ran. For the first one, he used a disciplinarian, negative self-talk approach to training. For the second, he only worked out when he felt like it, did yoga every day, and trained from a positive psychological state. Same race. Similar racing conditions. And he finished both in the same amount of time. His story reminded me of this piece from Derek Sivers about cycling from Venice Beach to Santa Monica. It begs the question: "When is effort superfluous, and when is it what makes all the difference?"

​The Mysteries of Eleusis: Jesse Michels runs a YouTube show called American Alchemist. He is a master at finding interesting guests from outside the media spotlight. I enjoyed his interview with Brian Muraresku, who penned The Immortality Key. The interview explores the mysterious rituals that once took place in a city called Eleusis, a site 13 miles north of Athens, which may have shaped early Christianity. Those who partook in these rituals were forbidden from talking about them, so we know very little about what took place. The contents of the Muraresku interview are somewhere on the spectrum between absolute nonsense and the secret history of the world’s biggest religion.

Alexis de Tocqueville: One of the most perceptive observers of American culture. His book, Democracy in America essentially asks: "How do people preserve freedom in an age of rising equality?" As opposed to contemporary thinking, Tocqueville believed that freedom and equality are fundamentally opposed to each other. In what's now known at the Tocqueville Effect, he argues that the more a group rises in society, the less they can tolerate their position in it. Practically, this means that revolutions are most likely to occur when social conditions are improving. When it comes to the American mind, he distinguishes between (1) the desire to learn for the sake of learning and (2) the desire to learn for the utility it provides. He argues that Americans were decidedly in the utility camp. Instead of valuing knowledge for the sake of it, they value it for its practical benefits — which is why, even today, people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk are praised for being smart, only insofar as it helps them build big companies. For an in-depth synopsis of Tocqueville's magnum opus, I recommend this piece from Johnathan Bi.