Category: Writing

Categories
Living Retirement Sports Writing

The Architecture of a Wound

I have read a lot of Wright Thompson pieces over the years. Enough to notice that I finish them feeling slightly implicated — like I have been shown something true about a person I thought I understood, and the showing has cost me something comfortable. That’s not a common feeling after reading sportswriting. Thompson’s a different kind of sports writer.

His profile of Steve Kerr, published this week in ESPN, is a case study in how he does it.

Go read it now. Before you continue here. Go read it!

The opening line: “Steve Kerr walked into the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire with a secret.”

Thompson doesn’t start with biography or context or the Warriors’ season. He starts with dramatic irony — we are placed inside a moment where the subject knows something we don’t, where the gap between public persona and private reality is already established before we’ve gotten through the first sentence. We know, even before we know what the secret is, that the real story will be about what lives underneath the official one.

The secret is retirement. Kerr had made up his mind — 95% certainty — that this would be his last season. He checked in at the Beverly Wilshire, gave his room number, 516, as “Johnny Bench Joe Montana,” and then leaned across the breakfast table and almost mouthed the words: “I think it’s over.”

That room number detail is worth pausing on. It isn’t decoration. A man who has spent 40 years inside professional basketball has encoded legends into the passwords of his daily life — Bench’s number, Montana’s number, woven together as a mnemonic for a hotel room he’ll forget in three days. Thompson drops it and moves on without comment. He never explains it. He doesn’t have to. The detail does its work the way a good poem does: you carry it with you, and it means more the longer you hold it.

This is the loaded object, and Thompson deploys it everywhere. Late in the piece, the coaches bond over the same memory trick on the road — Thompson tells Kerr he’s in room 2225, “Emmitt Smith Rocket Ismail.” The repetition isn’t accidental. It’s Thompson showing us what the 82-game season actually is: a long chain of hotel rooms and encoded legends, a man building temporary homes out of other people’s greatness.

Thompson earns the loaded objects by earning the access. He spent the entire season alongside Kerr — embedded, unhurried, a still presence at the edge of the frame. The piece has the texture of someone who was there for the small moments precisely because he wasn’t hunting the big ones. He’s in the coaches’ locker room after losses, cracking Peronis on the team bus through the quiet midnight of Atlanta, at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, at the Golden Gate Deli while Kerr eats his usual Honey Baked sandwich and texts “Conflicted” and then adds: “What’s Lulu think?” “She sees both sides.”

That kind of detail — the dog with two minds about retirement — is available only to a reporter who has spent enough time with a subject that the subject has stopped performing. Thompson collects these moments. They are the material.

But access is scaffolding. The building is what Thompson does with it.

Midway through the piece, he lands the paragraph that reorients everything that came before it. On January 18, 1984, a gunman shot Malcolm Kerr — Steve’s father, president of the American University of Beirut — in the head. A family friend reached Steve in his dorm room at 3 a.m. Steve asked if his father was okay. There was a long pause. “Your father was a great man,” the friend finally said.

Steve ran downstairs and pounded on his teammates’ doors. Then he went and sat on the curb. “On Speedway Boulevard,” he says, still remembering the cold concrete and the empty street. Thompson gives us that street name. He tells us Steve started walking, and that he hasn’t slowed down since.

Suddenly the retirement question isn’t about basketball at all.

The sport is Thompson’s vehicle. His real subject is always the wound underneath — what drives a person to keep competing, keep building teams, keep moving, and what it means when the movement finally starts to slow. The question running beneath the entire Kerr piece isn’t “Will he stay or go?” It’s the question Malcolm’s assassination put into his son at 18, still unanswered 42 years later: what do you do when the thing that protected you from the worst moment of your life stops being available?

Thompson makes this explicit in one passage near the end. Kerr describes his fear about retirement: the coaching job, he says, doesn’t just feed his soul — it helps him manage his chronic daily pain. The pain, we’ve learned by then, is rooted in unresolved trauma. Kerr has spent a year journaling every morning about his father’s death and then deleting what he wrote, following a therapy program based on the idea that emotional wounds express themselves as physical ones. The back pain that plagued him for 12 years — the migraines, the spinal leak, the decade of searching for relief from Mayo to Duke to England for stem-cell therapy — began the same year he took the Warriors job. Writing opens the lines of communication. Winning keeps them open. Retirement threatens to seal them again.

Thompson doesn’t editorialize. He just lays this all out, piece by piece, until the architecture becomes visible.

There’s a moment in Minneapolis, late in the piece, that sticks with me.

The NBA has postponed a game after a nurse named Alex Pretti has been killed by federal agents. Kerr gathers the team in a hotel ballroom. Later, working through what to say publicly, he does something Thompson says he’s never heard him do before — he invokes his father.

“My father was killed by extremists,” Kerr says, rehearsing lines. “I know how that story ends.”

Thompson can hear his voice catch between sentences. “I’m crying right now,” Kerr says.

At the press conference, Kerr doesn’t mention his father. He talks about the families who will never get their loved ones back. He didn’t have to say more. And Thompson, who was there for all of it — the hotel ballroom, the phone call, the media room — doesn’t have to explain the connection either. He’s done the work of showing us who Malcolm Kerr was, what his assassination meant, how Steve has carried it. The press conference lands with the full weight of everything we’ve already been given.

This is Thompson at his best: information as infrastructure, detail as detonator.

The piece ends not with a contract signing or a press conference. It ends with a granddaughter.

On the same day Kerr commits to returning — the decision made, the call to Steph placed, the band getting back together — his son’s younger daughter, Charlotte, takes her first steps. Kerr watches her toddle around the room. He thinks about his son as a toddler. He looks at the photograph on the wall of Nick and his older daughter grinning in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. “It all felt intertwined,” Thompson writes. “Blood family, basketball family, family. A cocoon, like his old Arizona manager said.”

That word — cocoon — has appeared once before. It’s what the Arizona manager called the arena the night Steve played two days after his father was killed. The crowd forming a protective warmth around a boy who had just lost everything. The team as shelter.

42 years later, it’s still what Steve Kerr is building and protecting. Thompson knew to plant the word the first time so it could bloom at the end.

That’s the technique. That’s what I mean when I say reading him costs something. In a wonderful way. He shows you that the things people build — teams, careers, dynasties — are sometimes just very elaborate answers to questions they were asked at 18 on a cold curb on Speedway Boulevard. And then he leaves you with a baby taking her first steps, and you feel the whole weight of it all at once.

Categories
AI Books Writing

The Tax We No Longer Have to Pay

When Carol Coye Benson and I sat down to write Payments Systems in the U.S., one of the first problems we had to solve wasn’t about payments. It was about history.

To understand why the ACH network works the way it does, or why checks persisted decades longer than anyone expected, you need the institutional sediment underneath — the regulatory decisions, the failed experiments, the path dependencies baked in by choices made in the 1970s that nobody thought would still matter in the 2000s. The history is the explanation. Strip it out and you have a description of current practice with no account of why it exists or what it cost to get there.

But history takes pages. And pages test a reader’s patience. So you compress. You make judgment calls about what survives the cut and what gets left behind, and you make those calls knowing that every omission is a bet — a bet that the reader can follow without it, that the thread holds without that particular knot.

Writing it taught me something. The act of compressing, of finding the minimum sufficient version of a complex thing, forces a clarity that living inside the complexity never quite delivers. You don’t fully know what you understand until you have to say it precisely enough for someone else to follow.

But compression is always a loss. You feel it as you write. The version in the book is thinner than the thing you know.

Garry Tan uses a term — “tokenmaxxing” — that initially sounds like jargon from a performance optimization thread. The idea is simple: don’t be stingy with context. Give the model everything. Every source document, every relevant article, every piece of background that a human reader would never sit still for. Let it synthesize rather than guess.

The instinct it runs against is deep. We have spent decades building information systems around compression — search engines that retrieve rather than ingest, executive summaries that stand in for reports, one-pagers that distill months of work into something a decision-maker can absorb in four minutes. All of it was a rational response to a real constraint: human attention is finite and expensive. You couldn’t afford to read everything, so you built filters. The whole architecture of how organizations manage information was designed around that limit.

Tokenmaxxing is a bet that the limit has moved.

The model can read everything. The cost of giving it full context — the uncompressed history, the original sources, the institutional sediment — is low enough now that filtering before the model sees it may introduce more error than it prevents. You’re potentially discarding signal when you summarize for the model the way you’d summarize for a human. The model doesn’t need the one-pager. It can handle the report.

This doesn’t dissolve the need for curation entirely. More context isn’t always better — models can lose the thread in noise the same way humans do, just differently. The skill shifts from summarizing to selecting: not what’s the minimum version of this but what’s actually worth including. Different judgment, still essential.

But the deeper change is upstream of any particular project. The compression we built into every research process, every briefing, every book — that was never the goal. It was the tax we paid for human cognitive limits. Part of the process doesn’t pay that tax anymore.

When I think about writing that payments book today, I don’t think the book itself would change much — it still has human readers with finite patience. But the map we drew before writing it, the synthesis work, the “what connects to what across fifty years of regulatory history” work — that could happen at a different depth now. The understanding you bring to the writing can be informed by everything, not just the subset you had time to read.

The payments book was written entirely for humans, with all the compression that implies. But Tyler Cowen just published what he calls a “generative book” — 40,000 words released free online, paired on the same screen with a Claude interface so readers can discuss, interrogate, and extend it in real time. He’s writing for both audiences simultaneously now. The human reader and the model that will help that reader go deeper. The text is optimized not just to be understood but to be used — as context, as a jumping-off point, as raw material for a conversation that the author won’t be in.

That’s a different kind of writing. Not better or worse. Different. The compression decisions change when one of your readers has no patience to protect.

Writing still clarifies thinking. That part hasn’t changed. But what you’re clarifying, and who you’re clarifying it for, is quietly expanding.

Categories
Writing

The Unfinished Note

I’ve been sitting with a Susan Orlean line for a few days now, the way you sit with a splinter you can’t quite locate.

“Stories don’t need a ‘conclusion,’ a flourish of finality. It’s better to leave readers falling forward, tumbling through the piece and beyond it, finishing the tune in their heads.”

What strikes me isn’t the advice — plenty of writing teachers have said something like it — but the verb she chose. Tumbling. Not drifting. Not lingering. Tumbling. There’s a loss of control in that word, a small helpless momentum, the way you take one more step than you expected on a dark staircase and your body has to catch up to itself.

I’ve always been suspicious of endings that arrive wearing their own bow. You can feel them coming, those last paragraphs — the rhythm slows, the sentences get more declarative, the writer seems to straighten up and clear their throat. And then comes the lesson, the restatement, the turn toward uplift or hard-won wisdom. The piece explains what it was about. You close the browser tab and that’s the end of it.

But some pieces don’t end so much as they stop, at the right moment and the right angle, and something in you keeps moving. You find yourself thinking about them in the shower two days later. You’re not remembering the conclusion because there wasn’t one. You’re still inside the piece, finishing the tune, as Orlean says. The writer handed you the melody and walked off mid-phrase.

I think about this with music. Jazz, especially. The best solos don’t resolve — they suggest a resolution and then leave the air charged with it. Miles Davis understood that the note you don’t play is still a note. The silence after the phrase is part of the phrase.

I’m not sure I’ve ever actually written an ending this way. Most of my pieces come in for a landing; I can feel myself starting to circle and descend. Maybe that’s the real lesson in Orlean’s line — not a craft note about structure, but a challenge to trust the reader enough to leave the door ajar. To believe the piece was good enough that they’ll want to keep walking around inside it.

I’m still not sure I do.

Categories
Storytelling Writing

The Nerve of the Opening Line

For years I wrote first paragraphs that explained what I was about to say, which is a little like a joke that begins by describing how funny it is.

Susan Orlean has a better idea. In her book Joyride, she writes that a lede doesn’t need to preview the story or summarize what the rest of the piece will be about. What’s important is that it captivates readers and holds them fast to the page so they keep reading.

The conventional wisdom about ledes is that they exist to tell readers what they’re about to read. The billboard theory of the opening. Here is what this story is. Here is why it matters. Here is what you’ll find if you continue. The lede as table of contents, compressed.

Orlean is saying something stranger and more honest: the lede’s job is not to inform. It’s to hold the reader.

There’s a distinction there worth sitting with.

Informing a reader is a transaction — you transfer content, they receive it. Holding a reader is something else entirely. It’s closer to what a magician does in the first thirty seconds of a performance, or what a stranger does when they say something at a party that makes you turn and face them fully. You haven’t learned anything yet. You’ve just been made to stay.

The ledes that have held me longest tend to have almost nothing to do with the stories they open.

Joan Didion begins “The White Album” with a single sentence — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — that takes the entire essay to even partially fulfill.

Gay Talese opens his Frank Sinatra profile not with Sinatra’s voice or his legend but with a man going silent: “Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing.”

Tracy Kidder opens The Soul of a New Machine not with computers but with a boat in a storm, Tom West awake for four straight nights while everyone else is seasick, the rest of the crew left wondering what on earth this man does for a living.

None of these ledes summarize. All of them hold.

What they share, I think, is a quality of disturbance. They’ve moved the ground slightly underfoot. Something is tilted.

Didion’s first sentence argues that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and you feel the vertigo in it immediately — wait, is that true? Is that a good thing or a desperate thing?

Talese gives you a man diminished by illness and silence, and everything that follows is measured against that diminishment.

Kidder’s boat goes somewhere that prose about minicomputers wouldn’t, and by the time you’ve crossed that dark water with West, you’re already a different kind of reader than you were on page one.

I think about this when I try to write.

I grew up reading ledes the billboard way — I thought the first paragraph was a promise about what the reader would receive. And sometimes I still write them that way, which is to say I write them first and delete them later, because they’re stage fright disguised as generosity. Here is what I’m about to tell you really means please don’t leave before I find my footing.

The Orlean formulation — captivate, hold, keep reading — shifts the pressure off the writer’s anxiety and onto the reader’s experience. The question is no longer what do I need to tell them? The question is what will make them unable to leave?

That’s a harder question. It requires knowing something about what people can’t resist. Strangeness. Motion. A body in trouble. A door left open. The suggestion that someone knows something you don’t.

The best ledes I’ve ever written didn’t come first. They came after I’d already written the whole piece and finally understood what it was actually about — which turned out not to be the thing I thought it was about at the start. You can’t write the sentence that makes someone stay until you know what you’re asking them to stay for.

The lede isn’t a promise. It’s a wager. You’re betting that the reader will follow disturbance into the dark — and the only way to make that bet is to trust the disturbance yourself first. Most of us don’t. Most of us write the billboard because we’re afraid that if we don’t explain what’s coming, the reader will leave.

But the reader doesn’t leave because they’re confused. They leave because nothing reached out and held them.

The explanation never does that. The strangeness might.

Categories
Living Sports Writing

When the Lights Come On

I was listening to a conversation with the writer Wright Thompson recently, and he struck a profound chord when talking about why he is so captivated by sports. He distilled the entirety of athletic competition down to a single, brilliant truth: it is all about who you are when “the lights come on.”

If you have ever stood in a massive arena or a darkened stadium just before the main event, you know exactly the feeling he means. The anticipation in the air isn’t just an emotion; it is a physical weight. You can feel the collective breath of thousands held in suspense. And then, with a sudden, sharp clack of the breakers, the big stadium lights hit. The room almost shakes with the sudden injection of energy. In that brilliant, unforgiving glare, every shadow vanishes. There is nowhere to hide.

We are taught from a young age to prepare, to practice, to build our skills in the quiet comfort of the shadows. We spend so much of our lives rehearsing our arguments, refining our projects, and constructing our mental models. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and what we are capable of achieving. But the true test of our character—the raw, unfiltered reality of our competence—isn’t found in the safety of preparation.

It is revealed in the sudden shock of execution.

Thompson’s observation about sports is ultimately an observation about the human condition. We aren’t all athletes waiting in the tunnel, shifting our weight from foot to foot, but we all face our own versions of the stadium lights.

I think about the seasons in my own life when the lights suddenly flared. The unexpected crisis that derailed months of careful planning. A sudden pivot required in a business strategy. A moment demanding moral courage when it would have been infinitely easier to remain quietly in the background. In some of those moments, I stepped up, grounded by the quiet work I had done in the dark. In others—and I admit this with a wince—I blinked against the glare, my confidence suddenly outpacing my competence.

That is the terrifying, beautiful geometry of choices. When the lights hit, the gap between who we claim to be and who we actually are is illuminated for everyone to see.

There is a kind of extreme accountability in that moment. It strips away the hedging and the theoretical. You either make the play, or you don’t. You either hold your ground, or you retreat. It is a crucible that burns away the superfluous, leaving only the essential truth of our character.

We cannot control when the switch will be flipped. The world has a habit of throwing us onto the stage precisely when we feel least ready. But we can control how we build ourselves in the dark. We can ensure that our patience isn’t just stubbornness in disguise, and that our confidence is deeply rooted in reality.

The chaos of the sudden glare isn’t an obstacle to the mission; it is the environment in which the mission earns its meaning. The lights will come on. They always do.

The only question that matters is who we will be in the glare.

Categories
Living Music Writing

The Tonic Chord of a Life

We spend a good portion of our lives surrounded by noise. Not just the literal kind—the hum of traffic or the ping of notifications—but the internal noise of unresolved tensions.

I was reminded of this while listening to a recent conversation between David Perell and the legendary journalist Tom Junod (https://youtu.be/JnHTUyZjwiY). Towards the end of their sprawling, beautiful discussion, Junod introduced a metaphor about writing that made me pause the audio and just sit with it for a moment. He talked about the “tonic chord.”

“Musicians, you know, back in the day, they were always looking for the tonic chord. And writing, I’m always looking for the tonic chord… where all the discordant harmonies are resolved in a single ba-boom, you know, at the end of Beethoven or whatever… looking for some sort of resolution to the stuff that gnaws at me.” [00:39:42]

It’s a striking image. In music theory, the tonic is the home base, the center of gravity. It is the chord that finally brings rest after a long sequence of tension and suspense. Without the preceding dissonance, the tonic chord has no power. The chaos isn’t an obstacle to the resolution; it is the very environment that makes the resolution meaningful.

This applies far beyond the blank page. We are all, in our own ways, searching for our tonic chords.

We carry around the stuff that gnaws at us—the contradictions in our relationships, the career choices that look good on paper but feel hollow in the chest, the quiet hypocrisies we tolerate in ourselves. These are the discordant notes. We spend so much of our lives trying to ignore them, turning up the volume on our daily routines to drown out the clash. Or we try to fix them with brute force, stubbornly demanding harmony before we’ve even listened to the melody.

But maybe the point isn’t to erase the tension. Junod’s genius—both in his essays and in this metaphor—is his willingness to sit with the discomfort. He looks directly at the friction. He places two opposing truths right next to each other, letting them rub like tectonic plates, waiting patiently for that final chord to finally release the pressure.

I think about the architecture of a well-lived life in much the same way. The most resonant moments I’ve experienced haven’t come from a smooth, unbroken string of successes. They usually arrive right after a period of intense confusion or struggle—a sudden moment of clarity on a foggy morning walk, a tough but honest conversation with a friend, or finally letting go of an idea that had lost its spark.

That sudden ba-boom of clarity. The release.

We are taught from childhood that a good life should be harmonious. But true harmony is earned. It requires us to listen closely to the discordant parts of our lives, to bear witness to our own messes and mysteries, and to patiently search for the truth that finally brings them all together.

Often, it is the ultimate act of self-awareness.

Seek serendipity.

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Categories
Living Writing

The Origami Swan

Fold a piece of paper enough times, and it begins to take shape. It looks like a swan, but it isn’t one. It’s origami. Two-dimensional paper masquerading in a three-dimensional world.

There is a profound danger, both in writing and in how we move through life, of viewing people as origami. We see the folded edges—what they do, what they say, where they go—and we mistake the shape for the substance.

The sportswriter Wright Thompson borrows a concept from a college Tennessee Williams class to describe what is missing when we do this: interiority. It is the subterranean emotional reality happening beneath the visible actions of a character. Without it, scenes are flat. Without it, people are just paper swans.

Thompson builds on the philosophy of Gary Smith, who argues that every profile fundamentally asks the same question: What is the central complication of this person’s life, and how do they go about solving it every single day?

Almost all of that solving happens quietly, invisibly, on the inside. The exterior architecture of a person’s life is entirely meaningless until you understand the interior architecture holding it up.

But how do you communicate something so deeply internal? You can’t just tell the reader what someone is feeling. It feels cheap, unearned. Instead, Thompson uses a technique of “loading the object.” You find an exterior detail—a habit, a possession, an avoidance—and you charge it with interior meaning.

“The exterior action… is only meaningful if you’ve built the interior architecture first.”

Consider Michael Jordan. Thompson learned that Jordan falls asleep to old Westerns. As an isolated fact, it’s just a quirky celebrity habit. But Thompson also learned that Jordan misses his murdered father every single day, and that watching Westerns was something they used to do together.

By introducing the Westerns early and casually, Thompson loads the object. By the end of the piece, when he simply describes Jordan falling asleep to a Western, he doesn’t need to explain the grief. The reader already carries the emotional weight of the object. A completely mundane action becomes devastating.

The same is true of Tiger Woods naming his boats Privacy and Solitude. To the casual observer, they are just wealthy indulgences. But once you understand the interiority of an extreme introvert who has been force-fitted into a global, extroverted marketing machine since childhood, those names are no longer just names. They are a diagnosis.

Executing this requires two distinct disciplines. The first is deep observation—what journalists call reporting. You cannot manufacture interiority at the keyboard. As Thompson notes, whenever a scene feels flat, it is because he hasn’t dug deep enough into the reality of the person to earn the meaning. Overwriting is simply underreporting with a better vocabulary.

The second discipline is restraint. Once you have built the interior context, you must stop talking. You have to let the exterior action land in silence. The human instinct is to over-explain, to ensure everyone gets it. But the magic happens when you step back and trust the connection you’ve built.

There is a philosophical lesson here that extends far beyond writing. How often do we settle for the origami versions of the people around us? How often do we try to talk our way into understanding them, rather than doing the deep, quiet work of observing their “loaded objects”?

To truly understand another human being requires the discipline to look past the surface, the patience to uncover their central complication, and the grace to let their quietest moments speak for themselves.

Note: Be sure to watch this conversation between Wright Thompson and David Perell.

Categories
AI Creativity Programming Writing

We Are All Painters Now: The Era of Vibe Coding

For decades, the act of creating software was exactly that: writing. It was a distinctly left-brained, agonizingly precise discipline.

Programmers were typists of logic, translating human intent into a rigid, unforgiving syntax that a machine could understand. A single misplaced semicolon, an unclosed bracket, or a misspelled variable could bring an entire system crashing down.

Building software meant placing one brick after another, working meticulously from the ground up.

In this traditional paradigm, coders were the ultimate embodiment of Annie Dillard’s writer. As she noted in The Writing Life, “Writers… work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.”

When you wrote code, your mistakes, your refactoring, and your discarded logic were all part of a linear, grueling journey. If a feature didn’t work, you had to physically wade back into the text, debugging, reading line by line, and rewriting the narrative of the application. The discarded chapters were the endless hours spent wrestling with a single broken dependency.

But recently, a profound paradigm shift has quietly taken over our screens. We are transitioning out of the era of writing software and into the era of “vibe coding.”

Vibe coding fundamentally changes our relationship with the machine. With the rise of advanced AI coding assistants, we are no longer placing the bricks ourselves; we have become the architects and the creative directors. You don’t write the loop or manually construct the database query. Instead, you describe the feeling, the function, and the outcome. You tell the AI, “Make this dashboard feel more modern,” or “The logic here is too clunky, make it flow faster and handle edge cases gracefully.” You are coding by intuition. You are steering by the “vibe” of the output rather than the mechanics of the input.

Suddenly, Dillard’s other metaphor takes center stage. In the age of vibe coding, we have become painters.

“A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them.”

When we vibe code, we ask an AI for a functional prototype, and it gives us a canvas. We look at it, test it, and sense whether it aligns with our vision. If it doesn’t quite hit the mark, we don’t necessarily rewrite the code from scratch. We simply prompt the AI to try again, adding a new layer of instruction. The AI paints a new layer of code directly over the old one. The awkward, underlying iterations—the messy attempts at styling, the inefficient logic of the first draft—are obliterated by the newest prompt.

The machine covers our tracks for us. We don’t need to know exactly how the underlying pixels were rearranged or how the syntax was refactored. The final application emerges as a stunning obliteration of its own clumsy past.

As someone who has spent time wrestling with the rigid demands of syntax, there is a strange, quiet grief in letting go of that left-to-right process. There is a deeply earned, tactile satisfaction in building something manually, understanding the precise weight and placement of every line of code. Relinquishing that control can feel like a loss of craftsmanship.

Yet, there is also a breathtaking liberation in this new medium. We are moving from a world of manual construction to a world of artistic curation. The barrier to entry is no longer fluency in a specific, arcane language; it is simply the clarity of your imagination and your ability to articulate your intent.

The next time you sit down to build something digital, notice the shift in your own posture. You no longer have to carry the heavy burden of the writer, agonizing over every word and leaving your discardable chapters on the left. You can step back, look at the whole canvas, and trust your intuition. Let the AI cover the tracks. Embrace the obliteration of the early drafts.

We are all painters now, coaxing the future into existence one brushstroke at a time.

Categories
News Writing

A Tribute to John F. Burns

“The commitment to fairness and balance and to shunning conventional truths when our reporting leads us in unexpected directions has been our gold standard.” — John F. Burns

As I’ve gotten older I pay closer attention to the obituary section of the New York Times. It frequently teaches me and brings back unusual memories that surprise me. Today it was my memory of years of reading the writings of John Burns brought back to life as I read his obituary.

Burns retired over ten years ago. I now remember thinking at the time just what a loss that would be for the paper. Reading Alan Cowell’s obituary of John F. Burns this morning, I felt that absence acutely.

For years, Burns was my first read—a “fireman” of the foreign desk who didn’t just report on the heat; he translated the embers.

Burns belonged to an era of journalism that felt more like a literary calling than a content cycle. He was a man who could find the “sweep of history” in the “telling detail of the present.”

Who else would think to frame the harrowing siege of Sarajevo through the haunting notes of a cellist playing Albinoni’s Adagio amidst the rubble? He understood that to explain a war, you must first explain the soul of the city being broken by it.

His career was a map of the 20th and 21st centuries’ most jagged edges—from the “wasteland of blasted mosques” in Bosnia to the “harrowing regime” of the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan.

Yet, for all his Pulitzers and his debonair appearances in a Burberry raincoat on Red Square, there was a refreshing, stubborn humility to his craft.

He famously tilted against the “missionary complex” of modern reporting. He didn’t want to save the world; he wanted to see it—clearly, fairly, and without the blinding influence of ideology.

There is something deeply moving about his partnership with his wife, Jane Scott-Long which wasn’t familiar to me. While John was the “full force of talent” at the keyboard, Jane was the architect of safety, turning run-down Baghdad houses into fortified sanctuaries with “military-style blast walls” and, perhaps most essentially, a state-of-the-art coffee machine. They were a team that survived the “chaos of war” by creating a small, civilized center within it.

In his later years after she passed, Burns became more reclusive, a quiet departure for a man once known as a “raconteur with panache.” It’s a transition that mirrors the profession itself. He flourished in a pre-internet era, where time-zone differentials allowed for “considered writing.” Today, the “blue pencil” of the editor has been replaced by the instant, unvetted roar of the social feed.

His final story for the Times was about the reburial of King Richard III. It was a fitting end: a story about the “sweep of the centuries” propelling the news of the day.

As I reflect back on his work and my years of reading it, I realize that what I miss isn’t just the news he delivered. I miss the way he delivered it—with the patience of a historian and the heart of a poet. He kept the paper straight, and in doing so, he helped us keep our bearings in a world that so often feels lost. Especially today.

Categories
Creativity Writing

The Crucible of the Blank Page

There is a distinct, often uncomfortable silence that accompanies a blank page. It’s not a lack of noise, but rather an overwhelming cacophony of unformed ideas waiting to be given shape.

We often operate under the assumption that we must have our thoughts perfectly ordered before we sit down to express them. We believe writing is merely the act of transcribing a fully formed philosophy from mind to paper.

But the truth is far messier, and infinitely more profound.

Flannery O’Connor captured this beautifully when she admitted:

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

I find myself returning to this admission constantly, deeply resonating with the reality of it. I’m the same way.

The human mind is a brilliant but chaotic place, a swirling ether of impressions, emotions, half-remembered conversations, and half-baked theories. Left to its own devices, it rarely settles on a singular, coherent truth. It requires the friction of articulation—the physical, deliberate act of putting words into a sequence—to force those nebulous clouds into something solid.

In an era increasingly defined by the allure of frictionless output, there is a profound temptation to skip this wrestling match.

We are surrounded by tools and shortcuts designed to hand us the finished essay, the polished insight, the perfectly packaged takeaway without us having to endure the messy, chaotic energy of the drafting process. It is easy to look at the blank page as a hurdle to be cleared rather than a necessary landscape to be traversed. But bypassing that struggle is a critical mistake.

You cannot skip the work of wrestling with ideas. That struggle is not a barrier to good writing; it is the core chaotic energy that underpins it. It is the crucible where conviction is forged.

When you wrestle with a sentence, striking it out, rewriting it, abandoning it entirely for a new thought, you are not just editing text on a screen. You are editing your own mind. You are testing the structural integrity of your beliefs.

The chaotic energy of a rough draft—the fragmented sentences, the sudden leaps of logic, the tangents that seem to lead nowhere—is evidence of a mind actively searching for meaning.

It is through this very friction that we discover what we actually believe.

An idea might feel profound when it is floating weightlessly in your head, but the moment you try to pin it down with language, its flaws and hollow points become glaringly obvious. Writing forces a confrontation with our own intellectual blind spots.

If we outsource this process, or if we try to circumvent the chaos by relying on templates or taking the path of least cognitive resistance, we lose the very mechanism by which we come to know ourselves. We might successfully produce text, but we will not produce insight.

The value of writing isn’t just in the final product meant for a reader’s eyes; it is in the transformation that occurs within the writer.

To write is to step into the unknown spaces of your own intellect. It is an act of revelation as much as communication.

So, the next time you find yourself staring at a blank page, feeling the chaotic energy of unformed thoughts, don’t retreat.

Lean into the mess. Let the words spill out, rough and unpolished, and trust that in the wreckage of your early drafts, you will finally read what you say, and in doing so, discover exactly what you think.