The virtues of ignorance and innocence in a world obsessed with being smart.| tolstoyan.substack.com
The virtues of ignorance and innocence in a world obsessed with being smart.| tolstoyan.substack.com
Birthdays, catastrophic lower-body injuries, LeBron James, the Roman Empire, the anguish of having lived, and triumphant sporting achievements.| Tolstoyan
Too much to read, what Picasso did when he was broke, the assassination of a Quebecois coke-dealer, and how the British Cycling Team stopped sucking.| Tolstoyan
Don Quixote, Giannis Atentekuompo, Stephen Marche, severed heads sprouting spider-legs, and massive failures that turn out to be huge successes.| Tolstoyan
Negativity bias, predatory algorithms, the drawbacks of being well-informed.| Tolstoyan
Struggling to scroll through essays about offensive art, bad desk placement, Ben Affleck's parallel parking, and how the 1990s was the last best decade.| Tolstoyan
Kindness, cooperation, soldiers who refuse to shoot, getting horny for the Oscars, and the drawbacks of being civilized.| Tolstoyan
Sir Lancelot, Watergate, Michael Jordan, and how we do (or don't) respond to the strangely shameful act of crying in public.| Tolstoyan
Judgment, hierarchy, and hard decisions as we count down to the number one thing of the year.| Tolstoyan
The ancient human tradition of list-making, ranking, and trying to make sense of everything that ever was.| Tolstoyan
Art galleries, eyepatches, existential crises, crossbow duels, good logos, and billion-dollar housewarming gifts.| Tolstoyan
Vanity, obscenity, running up hills, running out of time, and what Mortal Kombat looked like in the 1850s.| Tolstoyan
Birthdays, fancy robes, cleaning the kitchen, failing my kids, and how a book by the most famous writer in the world brought me here.| Tolstoyan
I. I PLANNED TO BEGIN this long-delayed message by saying it was hard to remember what I meant this newsletter to be, but that wouldn’t have been true, because I remember exactly what I meant it to be: a semi-weekly summary of my progress and accomplishments that would: (a) force me to (a) make progress, (b) accomplish things, and (c) earn me some small bit of your respect and admiration.| Tolstoyan
The desk in the front window of Black Squirrel Books in Ottawa, with an iced latte (in the Before Times).| Tolstoyan
Photo: George Plimpton, prolific writer and journalist, co-founder of the Paris Review, occasional actor and comedian, ignoring his kids to get work done before it was cool.| tolstoyan.substack.com
Occasional writing on big topics, in the Tolstoyan fashion. Click to read Tolstoyan, by Jared Young, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.| tolstoyan.substack.com
And what happens when it's gone.| tolstoyan.substack.com
And why our fear of dying is our biggest advantage over AI| tolstoyan.substack.com
And the perils of not being able to.| tolstoyan.substack.com
