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.
It’s also about the joy of reading widely and reading deeply, whether that’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry or philosophy.
Every week or so, I’ll write posts about:
Great contemporary literature, poetry and essays—I love writers like Annie Ernaux, Victoria Chang, Ben Lerner, and Olivia Laing
Older, canonical works—this year I’m reading Pierre Bourdieu and (re)reading Marcel Proust
Architecture and design trends
How to apply ideas from philosophy, critical theory, sociology, and art history to everyday life
I also write monthly roundups of books, films and visual design inspiration.
personal canon has featured by Substack twice: in Substack Reads and The Weekender.
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!
Where should I start reading? ✦✧
If you’re interested in literature:
If you want to read about architecture and design:
If you want to read about art and technology:
And if you’re an artist, writer, musician, researcher or technologist who needs some words of encouragement:
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
