Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Neil Gaiman, who brought us one of the best commencement speeches ever, chimes in on with a lecture explaining why using our imaginations is an obligation for all citizens. The correlation between …
From F. Scott Fitzgerald—famous author of The Great Gatsby—comes this letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald. Offering a hint of his parenting, the letter from August 1933 concludes with a …
Five years ago today David Foster Wallace committed suicide. His May 21st, 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class of Kenyon college, This is Water, is one of greatest of all time. Offering a …
Be careful if you ask Ernest Hemingway for his opinion. F. Scott Fitzgerald once asked Hemingway for an honest opinion on his book. Hemingway responded “You see well enough. But you stop listening.” …
What can we learn from the working habits of famous writers, artists, and composers? And how did they find time each day to do their work? After reading Mason Currey’s fantastic book, Daily …
In his book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey explores Philip Roth. Roth is full of insight. His comments on writing, taken from Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker, stuck with me. …
Mason Currey’s recently published Daily Rituals: How Artists Work mentioned the routines, quirks, and rituals of plenty of creative minds—novelists, painters, poets, philosophers, filmmakers, …
In his book, Daily Rituals, Mason Currey dug into Hemmingway’s 1958 Paris Review interview: When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. …
We’ve all been there. At the bookstore looking for a book to read. On one side of the store is the safe bet. The best-selling books that everyone else is reading. These are (generally) mediocre …
A brilliant passage from Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood on talent. There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can’t make the effort to …
Can you be too conscious? In his short 1864 book, Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells the story of a man who is “too conscious.” The man, whose name we never learn is so aware of his own …
“I want to be an educated, well-read, cultured, critically thinking person but need some stuff to read,” is the voice of an anonymous reader in the Ask The Paris Review section. The letter …
Just after publishing his new novel in 1934, Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald asked his friend Ernest Hemingway for an honest opinion on the book. And respond Hemingway did. The letter, found …
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. — Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice Today is the 200th anniversary of the …
A lot of people think that reading, especially critical reading, is on the decline. The thinking goes that we spend too much time distracted on devices. And when we turn the devices off long enough to …
We live in a multi-tasking world, but every so often we get lost in a task. We become so lost in what we are doing that time flies. We miss a meal, not because we are busy, but rather, because we are …