One of the things that may be apocryphal—because I’ve never bothered to actually look it up, just kept it kicking around in my head—is David Foster Wallace’s justification for the emphasis on footnotes in Infinite Jest: that they’re meant to be a physical metaphor for the give-and-take of a tennis match. You flip from the start of the book to the very end dozens, then hundreds of times, until you get to the final chapters where the flipping becomes more like leafing, as you get closer and closer...

I, like so many other people in the Tyler Cowen / Stripe Press extended universe, have deeply enjoyed Dan Wang's annual letters over the past years. And I was delighted to see that he returned to writing in the form of a long-form book, largely about the same subject. In writing my thoughts on this book, I returned to some of his earliest letters, which I found had aged like wine: I cannot recommend enough carving out an afternoon to read them.

Long Story Short, feels like in many ways a synthesis of everything Raphael and Lisa have been trying to do and say, packaged in a slightly more mature and restrained way than the excesses of Bojack Horseman and their respective written fiction (everyone should read Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory).

After what has felt like a long winter of habitual reliance on my existing tools, I’m finally playing around with some new ones. This is a healthy habit—so long as you don’t convince yourself that you’re just one more App Store download away from a previously unimaginable level of personal satisfaction and joy.