Admiring Bog

A skinny guy next to them was wearing giant headphones, typing furiously into his laptop, like a movie hacker trying to crack into the Pentagon.

--

It is a funny story, I think, funny the way crows are funny birds, more knowing than they let on. The story pretends to be about names but it’s actually a story about time, how time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever. Into dirt. There’s something comforting about that, something vast and, yes, inescapable. Like bright ink spilling over everyone at once.

--

“I don’t mean what do you do for school or money,” Zee said. “I’m asking what do you do. What do you love?”

--

That people found the surplus psychic bandwidth to consider—or even worry over—anyone else’s interior seemed a bit of an unheralded miracle. Cyrus read on a website once that there was a word for this: sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

--

Cyrus thought about what an aggressively human leader on earth might look like. One who, instead of defending decades-old obviously wrong positions, said, “Well, of course I changed my mind, I was presented with new information, that’s the definition of critical thinking.” That it seemed impossible to conceive of a political leader making such a statement made Cyrus mad, then sad.

--

He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that. He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.”

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the war won’t ever end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave,

--

it’s no more absurd than the opposite, world leaders in play costumes of braids, buckles, aiguillettes, pompons, tufts, cords, plates, and sashes, in playpens of castles and state rooms, pushing wooden blocks around a game map, a magic trick that shoves millions of men across actual battlefields, it’s really the same game, rock crushes kaiser, paper covers tsar, the scissors of the Entente snips Europe into new configurations,

--

Bagger’s fingertips slip through fabric and graze the softest cheek, a scant touch that nevertheless fills him with the equilibrium of hope, and he takes the hood edge and draws it back, whereupon the dugout’s tabernacle of lanterns bows in deference to a brighter master, and Reis’s rage melts to butter inside the scintillant splendor,

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From his mother, Mark Twain learned that he could trust women and express a richer spectrum of emotion than with men. With his father, Sam had to suppress his personality; with his mother, he could flaunt it.

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Jane Clemens communicated to her son a deep love of animals, most notably cats. Unable to resist strays, she at one point had collected nineteen cats, a fondness for animals that moved her granddaughter to protest, “Grandma, I believe you like cats better than babies.”

A bit miffed, Jane defended her behavior: “When you’re tired of a cat you can put it down.”

--

He wrote scornfully of “what passed for a school in those days: a place where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight or ten hours a day to learn incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of books and reciting it by rote, like parrots.”

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If Mark Twain became the quintessential American writer, it may have been because his father left such a poignant example of failure in a land obsessed with money and success. Twain would suffer the lifelong financial anxiety of someone whose family fortunes had crashed in early life.

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Here lay the supreme ambition of any Hannibal boy—to be a riverboat pilot, with a salary equal to that of the U.S. vice president or a Supreme Court justice.

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Twain was increasingly dismayed by the inexcusable gap in wealth between churches and their surrounding poverty. He passed by hordes of beggars clustered at the doors of magnificent cathedrals. “Now, where is the use,” he wondered, “of allowing all those riches to lie idle, while half of that community hardly know, from day to day, how they are going to keep body and soul together?”

--

He was never a literary snob faking indifference to sales. In late January, he made his way to Hartford and met with Bliss, whom he described, in his later jaundiced view, as “a tall, lean, skinny, yellow, toothless, bald-headed, rat-eyed professional liar and scoundrel,” with “the intense earnestness and eagerness of a circular-saw” when it came to money matters.

--

The high-strung Twain couldn’t tolerate more than three or four hours of sleep per night. At meals, he would pace the floor between courses, discoursing at length, while Livy could scarcely stroll two hundred yards without resting. Yet it was Livy who ruled; Livy who took this glorious misfit and gave his home a veneer of normality; Livy who trained him in social graces, making him palatable to polite society. She civilized him, in the best sense of the word, and that took enormous courage.

--

Like many writers before him, Twain discovered that the past recaptured was often more poignant than the past actually lived.

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The rest of Mark Twain’s life would show that what he played for laughter in Tom Sawyer was no laughing matter for him. For all its charm, Tom Sawyer presents an inverted worldview in which middle-class moralists are hypocrites, and outcasts are people of true value.

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“I’m going to ask that tomorrow everyone bring in a product that means something to them. Really means something to you”—narrowing his eyes as if to switch the italics on in his voice—“you know?”

I don’t. “Yes, of course.”

“Good. Bring it in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.”

When I get back to my desk, I Google: what is a product

--

The night, like a cat, suffers from resting void face.

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Why did they say everyone deserved to be treated equally, but that this was “complicated” when it came to people without money and Palestinians?

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News used to be delivered to one’s door, printed on thin paper. Nowadays it simply penetrates the face, to be printed on our brains, where it rots.

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No one gets to stay in the motel they want, but everyone gets to stay in the motel they deserve.

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I couldn’t wait to lose the person I’d been. What is college except the chance to try on many selves?

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Mathilde didn’t understand my decision. “What’s so bad about derivation? Isn’t everything derived? We just usually call it ‘in conversation with…’ Is it even possible to really copy someone? If someone tried their hardest to mimic another person, their unique life experiences and skills would still yield completely different results.”

--

I believe that every person is capable of art that meaningfully connects with others in the world.” “I’ve always felt that I wasn’t as gifted as other people.” “Ah-ah. Like I always say in my first lecture to every new class, there is no gifted. Only the gift of being fully oneself, and expressing oneself to the utmost.”

--

This, this now, was me: vast, unlimited in the range and delicacy of my voice, unrestrained in love, rapid in apprehension, skillful in motion, capable, equally, of traversing, within a few seconds’ time, a mile or ten thousand miles. The champion of a cause I would never forsake: To comfort. To comfort whomever I could, in whatever way I might. For this was the work our great God in Heaven had given me.

--

As mentioned, I am vast, unlimited in the range and delicacy of my voice, unrestrained in love, rapid in apprehension, skillful in motion, capable, equally, of traversing, within a few seconds’ time, a mile or ten thousand miles.

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Traditional publishing often takes two to three years to launch a manuscript.

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Money is fuel.

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Vision Boards: Training Wheels for Time Travel

Vision boards work because the brain is a magician that obeys rehearsal. A 2025 study on “Digital Vision Boards in Goal-Setting and Reflection” found that students who reviewed their boards weekly hit significantly more milestones than the control group.

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Language calibrates pricing, as well as how the world treats you. So let’s revisit how you describe what you do, both to yourself and to others.

It’s not “here’s what I charge.”

It’s “Here is the investment required to bring your book to life.”

It’s not “I’m a freelance writer.” I

t’s “I’m a luxury memoir ghostwriter.”

Those shifts aren’t cosmetic. They reframe value. They reposition power.

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I use a modular schedule—a weekly dashboard where I track what actually matters: how many times I want to hit 10,000 steps, how often I want to go to yoga, how many deep work blocks I’m committing to.

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Greg McKeown’s excellent book Essentialism nails the metaphor of how we spend our energy. Picture two circles, each fed by the same amount of energy. The first shoots a dozen arrows in every direction. It’s a lamp, illuminating everything but igniting nothing. The second shoots one concentrated beam. A laser. Because the light is focused, it can burn through steel.

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On the writing business side? I raised my freelance writing rates from $90/hour to $1,000/hour during the five years I poured real focus into growing my ghostwriting services.

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Make a list of the last five people who paid you for your creative work. Were they sponsors? Clients? Fans?

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Self-publishing isn’t a consolation prize, it’s the power move. It’s the difference between renting your creative life from a gatekeeper and owning the damn building. Traditional publishing sells you prestige and sprinkles of validation, but behind the curtain? You’re signing away control, speed, and a huge chunk of your profits.

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Of the hundred most-watched U.S. television telecasts in 2023, 93 involved NFL football, and three of the remaining seven were college games. In 2024, the overall number dipped to 76, but only because it was an election year (though the Super Bowl still outpaced the election night results).

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The language and symbolism of American football have infiltrated every dimension of American life, an immersion amplified by the fact that North America is the only continent where the game is played with real seriousness. Football is the clearest projection of how people of the United States think and of what those people value, even (and perhaps especially) when football is something they actively dislike. The role it plays in the shaping of our contemporary reality is both outsized and underrated. And this is going to pose a problem in the future because football is doomed, and all those people who do not yet exist are going to misunderstand why it once mattered as much as it did.

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This will not be a book about fandom, tribalism, and community. I view these aspects as negative and perverse. To me, those are all arguments against football.

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I often fear no one misunderstands me as much as I misunderstand myself.

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About the 1958 NFL title game: What people realized is that nothing, nothing had ever been better designed for TV than this particular sport. It was the sudden comprehension of accidental perfection, spawning a relationship that would transform the parameters of what a sport can mean to a society increasingly controlled by a media-centric view of everything.

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The difference between an informed fan and a casual fan is the ability to see order within disorder. It’s not sensically satisfying to locate the levers of control we’re trained to view as suffocating and unfun. What makes football different is that the control is so ingrained and pervasive that we stop thinking about it as control. Instead, we understand it as the game’s natural state, and any moment of true improvisation becomes a transfixing exception.

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It’s not that basketball is jazz and football is anti-jazz, or that basketball is jazz and football is prog rock. It’s more that basketball aspires to jazz and football aspires to petroleum engineering.

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When I insist that football explains America, it’s not a compliment or an insult to either. It means only that both have improved and advanced at the same time in the same way in a manner that almost never feels good. Because once something becomes what you want, it can only get worse.

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The Humane Society claims the number of privately owned pet tigers in Texas is greater than the population of wild tigers in all of India.

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Belichick has claimed the strategic value of watching a football game live on the sideline is “less than 1%,” meaning the other 99% must be learned through repetitive study of film.

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According to teammates, Tom Brady spent around 40 hours a week watching game footage. Even in retirement, he claims to sometimes watch five hours of film a day, an experience he classifies as “soothing.”

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Under Alex Guerrero’s tutelage, Brady changed everything about his life. He adhered to a high-protein, plant-based diet that avoided dairy, bread, caffeine, alcohol, tomatoes, soy, and sugar. He supposedly drank 37 glasses of water a day. During football season, Brady would go to bed at 8:30 p.m. and wake at dawn. Part of what made Brady great, it seems, was a willingness to pursue an objectively dismal life.

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A normal fan is like a person who listens to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and thinks, this music is beautiful. A gambler is like a person who listens to Symphony No. 5 and thinks, I don’t trust the motives of the bassoonist.

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Former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer claimed one recruiting technique was to walk through the alley behind a recruit’s residence before entering the house. He wanted to see what brand of empty beer bottles were in the trash so that if the recruit’s father offered him a beer, he could casually request the brand he’d already seen discarded outside.

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Nick Saban and Bill Belichick derive so much unexpected happiness from self-imposed misery. It’s as if they read the myth of Sisyphus and decided Sisyphus had the best life possible.

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Part of the reason American football so aptly reflects American society is that both entities share an inability to find a center path. There’s a tendency in U.S. society and in U.S. football to remain as conservative as possible for as long as possible, only to suddenly redirect that inertia by massively overcorrecting the previous condition.

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It’s common to classify an entity like the NFL as “too big to fail,” but it’s actually too big to stop.

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Football is an ethnocentric game beloved in only one country. This is not what we want. Football is violent, and its violence is sometimes praised. This is not what we want. Football is an exclusionary activity exclusively played by men. This is not what we want. Football does not reject “toxic masculinity.” This is not what we want. Football celebrates the ability to ignore injury and accept pain. This is not what we want. Football rewards domination of the weak. This is not what we want. Football shuns individualism and identity. This is not what we want. Football is authoritarian and militaristic. This is not what we want. Football is hierarchically controlled with objective outcomes. This is not what we want. Football is uncomfortable, uncompromising, demoralizing. This is not what we want. Football, from a structural vantage point, is fascist and reactionary. This is not what we want. Nothing about the culture of football is what we want, or what we are told to want, or what we are supposed to want.

--

There is an inescapability to football’s present-day dominance, accepted by everyone. But like horse racing in 1935, the root of that dominance is becoming distant from the lived experience of its fan base. A link still exists, but it’s intangible, imaginative, almost sci-fi. It’s no longer a game many people played in high school or even a game their fathers played in high school. It’s something your family watched on TV, so you do the same, mostly out of habit. It’s a live-action video game. It’s a fantasy league your coworker persuaded you to join. It’s an excuse to make a wager on your phone. It’s a series of three-hour reality shows airing every autumn weekend. And its narrative is the culture that football controls. But that culture is increasingly foreign to those who digest it.

Whether you’ve got your whole career ahead of you or are looking to make a change, it seems to me you’ve got roughly four options:

Category I jobs: not that ambitious, not that idealistic

Category II jobs: ambitious, but not all that idealistic

Category III jobs: idealistic, but not all that ambitious

Category IV: idealistic and ambitious

Category I jobs: not that ambitious, not that idealistic

A class of influencers and marketeers, of lobbyists and managers, of consultants and corporate lawyers—all people who could go on strike and the world would be just fine. Remarkably enough, this group includes many men and women with impressive credentials and equally impressive salaries.

It was a Facebook employee who said,

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

There’s a striking correlation between the level of pay in a given industry and how moral or immoral we think it is.

Nothing wrong with having some savings and investments, of course. But at its core, this kind of thinking always seems a little sad to me. It means you’re chasing a form of freedom where you won’t have to lift a finger. The dream is to make the transition from office serf to person of independent means, so you can delegate all the annoying work and no longer have to contribute to society.

Category II jobs: ambitious, but not all that idealistic

These people want to reach the top, but use soulless indicators for success: a fancy title, fat salary, corner office, or other perks.

Category III jobs: idealistic, but not all that ambitious

... made up of people who’re idealistic, but not that ambitious. It’s a combination often seen in Gen Z—people born since 1996.

Awareness is at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal.

Category IV: idealistic and ambitious

--

My personal hero—someone I’ll come back to often in this book—the author and activist Thomas Clarkson.

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Picture a window, said Overton, framing all the ideas taken seriously at a given point in time. These are the opinions you can voice at dinner parties without people giving you the side-eye. If you hold dear a conviction that lies outside this frame, you’ll promptly be dismissed as a nut or a fool. Politicians in particular have to stay inside the frame if they want to get reelected.

But then how do you change the world? If you have to stay inside the frame, how do you change the view? Overton wrote that the key is to shift the whole window.

--

To put it bluntly: awareness is overrated. The fact that people are aware of various injustices doesn’t mean they’ll act on that knowledge—on the contrary. We hold all kinds of opinions on all kinds of matters, but we generally do little with our viewpoints.

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Learn to weep over spreadsheets

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He applied the twenty-minute rule. “I often challenge myself in thinking: If I want to do this thing that I’m trying to do, how would I do it in twenty minutes?”

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The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said.

“The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.”

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In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.

Coco Chanel, fashion designer

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Charity Entrepreneurship is a program for entrepreneurs—entrepreneurs with moral ambition.

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What do all these problems have in common? They’re sizable, they’re often super-solvable, and they’re sorely overlooked—the three S’s,

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At Charity Entrepreneurship, you’re trained to score your highest possible VORP. To go where no one else is going. Every year, there’s a small army of idealists who can’t wait to start the new Tesla of charities. As soon as the school announces the year’s new causes on its website, thousands of prospective students from all over the world apply to attend. Following an extensive application process, a select group is invited to come to London. They’re given a two-month crash course, matched with a cofounder and a cause, and provided with modest seed capital.

You’ve got to be prepared to work incredibly hard. “You can set your own hours,” Joey says with a smile. “As long as it’s all of them.”

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To this day, smallpox is the only human disease we’ve completely eradicated.

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“Whenever I’m asked to name my feminist heroine,” writes the British feminist Helen Lewis, “I’m tempted to answer: the washing machine.”

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“The rapid progress true science now makes,” wrote Benjamin Franklin back in 1780, “occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.”

You know how we see people in the Dark Ages? That may well be how our great-grandchildren will look back on us.

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Don’t start out by asking, “What’s my passion?” Ask instead, “How can I contribute most?” And then choose the role that suits you best.

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The students at Oxford? They’d had enough of stodgy professors. There were demonstrations against something or other every week. A few years earlier, Malcolm X had paid a visit to the university. He’d made clear to students that they lived in “a time of extremism, a time of revolution.”

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The best charities are fifty times (!) more effective than the median charity and a whopping 10,000 times more effective than the worst ones. Seems the economics of altruism is also subject to a power law, with at least 80 percent of results attained by just 20 percent of what we do.

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Remember sitting in history, thinking: if I was alive then, I would’ve… You’re alive now. Whatever you’re doing is what you would’ve done.

~ David Slack, television writer and producer (b. 1972)

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Your legacy is never one thing. Your legacy is every life you’ve touched, every person whose life was either moved or not. It’s every person you’ve harmed or helped. That’s your legacy.

~ Maya Angelou, author (1928–2014)

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Product advertising explains teh product to me. Brand advertising explains me to me.

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The best stories usually hook you with their intro. They start as they mean to go on rather than clearing their throat before they get down to business.

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A good advertisement requires teh reader to complete the communication on his own behalf.

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Tim Delaney:

How I write copy:

On my laptop

With every available fact about product and category to hand

In a quiet meeting room. Or on Sunday morning

At least a day after the Project Manager says it's needed

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The more ideas you come up with, the less obvious the later ones are going to be, if only because you have to avoid repeating those first thoughts. So you're bound to get to a more original idea.

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A headline that needs a subhead usually needs more work.

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Life's too short to read body copy.

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I find there is a direct correlation between rising panic and burgeoning inspiration.

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First, "Senfield it," which means write down every conceivable entertaining observation and insight that you can think of based on teh product or service that you're selling. In your best whiny Senfield voice write "What's teh deal with [insert product here]?"

Second, "Will Ferrel it," which means writing down every conceivable fun, weird, imaginative, and exciting thing that you can think of that has nothing to do with what you're selling. Then work backwards and connect it somehow.

Now, put everything you've written on the wall. By "Seinfelding it" you've covered every idea you can think of working directly out of hte product itself, and by "Will Ferrell-ing it" you've covered every idea you can thin kof that comes from the unique, outer reaches of you and connects back to the product.

Share all ideas with someone you trust. better yet, share them with your client.

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A great headline is just the truth about a product expressed in an arresting way.

~ Andy McLeod

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If you can't write something startling, don't write anything at all.