Storyteller. Working on debut novel.
Joined December 2010
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Page One: “Blood Meridian” (1985), by Cormac McCarthy.
One of the best to ever do it. This book had me hooked and I finished it in a little over a week, and it all started on page one.
Everything about the writing feels immersive, biblical, and intentional. Every word feels like a choice. And beyond conveying information, or simply setting a scene, the first page sets the mood and tone.
There’s also a rhythm. Short sentences followed by longer ones, that mixed up again. It is never repetitive. The first sentence is three words.
This will be an epic story, the author is hinting to us, and it begins with a boy around a scullery fire, longing to escape from home.
The final line is both a literary allusion to a William Wordsworth poem, and a foreshadow of what is to come.
A group of us in my area do something similar, though we haven’t done books as long as IJ yet.
So far, we’ve read:
Stella Maris
Blood Meridian
Breakfast At Tiffany’s
Remains of The Day
The School of Night
American Psycho
Get offline, read physical books, and meet people IRL.
For two years, writer Rebecca Jennings gathered with a group of friends each Wednesday to discuss their progress on a famously grueling book. They started with ‘Infinite Jest’ and ‘The Power Broker’ and continued with ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Gotham,’ a 1,400-page history of New York City that often reads like the world’s most tedious Wikipedia article. The Difficult Book Book Club didn’t start as an explicit strategy to wrest their attention from screens, but that’s what it became.
Twenty years ago, an adult could focus on a screen without interruption for an average of two and a half minutes, says Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. In 2012, that measure was about 75 seconds, and according to studies done between 2015 and 2021, it then shrank to an average of 47. With these statistics, Jennings sought out solutions to fixing our rapidly declining attention spans.
Revisit Jennings’s 2025 essay on how she learned to navigate the new age of “obsessional politics”: nymag.visitlink.me/YxHICG
You Can See Everything is a masterpiece. From lighting, to soundtrack, to pacing, and payoff. So many layers of a genius film that was unsettling, uncomfortable, and left me with more questions coming out.
Anytime I’m invited somewhere I’m not sure I’ll enjoy, I remind myself that the worst outcome is wonderful characters for my stories. The best outcome is meeting interesting people who may become friends. This has solved a lot of my personal social anxiety, and improved my writing.
I'm not a big digital reader, just can't get into it. Too ADHD. I prefer physical books. But I love to see new things happening in the world of books. This, in particular, looks very promising.
There's going to be an even greater push for real, human, messy content without feeds, AI, and machine-centrism. Excited to see where this one goes...
What an incredible opportunity for the right person
I’m hiring an NYC-based Managing Editor for @stripepress. The ideal person for this role has substantial editorial experience at a publishing imprint or another publication and is fluent in our universe of ideas, but ideally isn’t my (or our) ideological twin.
Stripe Press is a small team with an unusual amount of autonomy. Right now we’re obsessively focused on the future: expanding our catalogue, rethinking our assumptions about the kinds of books we publish (fiction!?), and thinking about how to connect our readers w/ one another beyond the pop-ups we’ve been hosting since 2022.
Hoping to meet a lot of brilliant people who love books and are excited about building a world-class publishing institution: stripe.com/careers/listing/m…
Tom Harari retweeted
I just spoke with @BenWilsonTweets and he said the response to the episode has been “life-affirming”. Since it was released he’s received introductions to other people who have beaten advanced cancer and so far you have helped raise over $800,000 for Ben and his family. Ben’s doctor originally gave him a year to live. With the new medication Ben is on (that’s working!) the goal is to push that out to 2 to 3 years and then with new therapies push 2 to 3 to 10, and then 10 to 25, and 25 to 50 and Ben gets to see his 4 small children grow up. Even today someone offered to make an introduction to Ben for a promising new therapy.
I’d like to ask you to keep helping spread the word about Ben. Someone out there that doesn’t know about Ben (yet) could have information that could save his life. And if you’d like to donate you can do that here. Every little bit matters: gofundme.com/f/help-ben-figh…
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5.
I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38.
He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations.
0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders.
55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
Not many people know that the first English translation of Spinoza was written by George Elliot.
It was only after she finished translating Spinoza that she embarked on her career as a novelist.
tomharari.substack.com/p/geo…
In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. youtube.com/watch?v=XD_Cww5Q… #Middelmarch #Spinoza #Hegel #literature #philosophy
Tom Harari retweeted
I wrote about Cormac McCarthy (including the new biography) for @Harpers harpers.org/archive/2026/11/…
We are so back
"Actually, in America, the reading of books is up." newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
Support for Bentov’s theory of consciousness?
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
Tom Harari retweeted
I'm reading Warhol by Blake Gopnik, and it's great, but there are so many references to artists/art/styles/etc... that I hadn't heard of and can't picture, so I fed Codex the epub and asked it to catalog everything, put it on a timeline, make connections, etc...
Tom Harari retweeted
This is my fourth lecture on Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN—a deep dive into Judge Holden’s “War is god” sermon. Free to any who are interested: youtu.be/pzrnQJcOnMw?is=XmQE…
Tom Harari retweeted
Worrying about recursive self-improvement in 1996 is very impressive, but few know that George Eliot, of Middlemarch brilliance, wrote about the threat of RSI leading to human obsolescence way back in 1879 (!)
She glimpsed this idea at the very start of the second industrial revolution, just by contemplating an automated weighing machine at the Bank of England.
From "Shadows of the Coming Race":
The reason this article is shitty is because no one cares about the writer's editorializing or telling the reader how to feel. Just write what happened and let the reader decide. Why do we care about the writer's personal diagnosis of his behaviors?
Also, I don't even know how to picture "his face floated halfway out of frame." Is this meant to conjure a vidid image in our minds?
This whole article is a missed opportunity to tell a story about a controversial topic and the people behind one side of the controversy.
sci-fi writers will need to get a lot more creative moving forward.
I'm delighted to share that Physical Superintelligence PBC (PSI), which I co-founded with @matthew_pines and @AKlokus, has raised a $58M seed round to build the world's most advanced research lab for discovering and commercializing transformative physics breakthroughs at scale with AI, safely, verifiably, and for broad public benefit.