Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

First, a hiring update: I’m looking for a Production Operations Lead to help with all my creative projects — from writing this newsletter, to making YouTube videos, to teaching Write of Passage, to launching a new writing-focused podcast, to managing a new production studio I’m building in Austin.

Here is the job description and the application to apply. You’d be working very closely with me, and the deadline to apply is March 14th.

Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. Expression is Compression: What makes communication successful? Compression. And it applies to all kinds of art forms — drawing, writing, music, dance, and storytelling. You can read my essay or watch the video here.
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2. ​Interview with Logic: Last year, I interviewed the Grammy-nominated rapper Logic about his creative process. We started with a focus on his writing process and by the end, it felt like as casual as a Saturday night hangout session. For a preview, here’s a clip of him talking about his note-taking process. You can watch the full interview here.

Coolest Things I Learned This Week​
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Don’t Try to Write Poetically

The subliminal message of English class is that good writing needs to be poetic. Students read novels with purple prose and try to replicate it in their five-paragraph essays so they can impress their teachers.

This obsession with poetic writing is one of the most destructive outcomes of modern writing education. Focus on clear writing instead.

Basketball provides an analogy. Even if all the stars know how to do fancy dribbles like “through the legs,” the “spin move,” and “behind the back,” you shouldn’t start there. You should master the basic dribbles first. Jumping into advanced dribbles when you start playing basketball is the fastest way to look like a goon and get the ball stolen from you. No matter how fancy their dribbling can become, even the best players focus on basic moves that aren’t impressive but get the job done.

Focus on writing clearly. Let poetic language be a byproduct of clear writing and don’t even think about lavish prose until you’ve mastered the art of writing clearly.

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How Biographies Have Changed

In The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell makes a point that I can’t get out of my head.

Before the 1980s, if you asked what people are most worth following, people would've been more likely to say poets, priests, and philosophers. Even if they didn’t have fat pocketbooks, they were wealthy with wisdom. People thought that moguls were unbalanced and unenviable.

Things changed in the 1980s when titans of industry like Jack Welch started to write autobiographies. Since then, society has become less Greek and more Roman. Caldwell writes: “More than any generation for a century, and in sharp contrast to its own declared youthful values, the Baby Boom generation revered wealth.”

Perhaps, we should reconsider our objects of reverence.

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Thinking Clearly

To avoid fashionable thinking, be skeptical of any word that was invented in the past decade.

As a society, we need to balance the agility of fresh language with the wisdom of tradition. Though language and culture must evolve, we should be skeptical of novelty.

Will and Ariel Durant said it best in The Lessons of History: “The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it — perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection and opposition; this is the trial heat which innovation must survive before being allowed to enter the human race.”

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Topographical Maps

I can’t stop looking at these maps. Every time I see one, I guess where the big cities are. Usually, they’re close to the ocean which makes for easy trading because transporting things by water is so much cheaper than transporting them by land. Often, they’re also close to valleys which tend to have lots of rainwater and therefore, arable land.

The three maps below are from Thailand, California, and India.

Photo of the Week

I attended James Turrell’s Skyscape exhibit at the University of Texas twice last week. Chances are, you’ve seen his work (maybe without realizing it, either in Drake’s Hotline Bling music video or Kanye’s Jesus is King documentary).

The theme of his work is how light influences perception. At the top of the room is a 12x8 foot oval and by looking through it, you can see the sky. For the duration of the show, the lighting is in constant flux. The circle seems to contract whenever the lights in the room brighten. But when the colors are softer, the oval seems to expand.

Photos don’t capture one of the most important elements: the texture of the sky. Since I went at sunset both times, the color of the sky was always changing.

Your point of focus is distinct too. Usually, when you watch the sunset, you’re focused on the horizon. But the angles in the room forced you to look at the clouds above. Since the oval focuses your attention on such a narrow point in the sky, the clouds look much more alive than they do when you’re looking at the entirety of an expansive sky. Sometimes, they even look violent.

There are three main characters in the art: the sky, the oval, and the room. When you show up, the sky and the oval are the main characters. As you focus on the oval, it seems to pulse — almost in a psychedelic way. Dark colors expand the oval. Light colors contract it. Meanwhile, the changing colors in the room make you appreciate the relationships between them. The sky looks bluest when the room is yellow or orange. But as the sun meets the horizon, the oranges are accentuated by a blue hue. By the end of the show, once the sun has set, you can see stars in the sky and the room has become the main character.