“11 things only left-handers know.”
Ezra Klein on the podcast Blocks with Neal Brennan
Category: Writing
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If an em dash fits into one’s writing but they avoid using it out of fear, our AI overlords have won.
I feel like I have to “dumb down” aspects of writing to convince readers that the words they are skimming were, in fact, written by a human.
I Miss Using Em Dashes by Michael Bassili
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There are many readers who only audit books, and never read them
“Audit books”
I’ve never felt comfortable saying I read a book if I only listened to the audiobook version. It’s a valid way to engage with a text (and the only way I can get through some dry nonfiction without spontaneously napping) so no shade, but retention and engagement isn’t always the same. So I like Kevin Kelley’s casual use of “auditing” as a verb for audiobooks.
I’ll read anything Kevin Kelley writes. Recently, he wrote about self-publishing: “Everything I Know about Self-Publishing.
I think there is some survivorship bias at play here, so approach his advice aware of the audience he’s already cultivated.
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Grinding, repetitive friction built something no language model can download into you: muscle memory for excellence.
In his essay (ok, Substack) “The defense against slop and brainrot“, Paul Jun describes a writing exercise lifted from Hunter S. Thompson: He’d grind away through writer’s block, typing The Great Gatzby word-for-word until,
By the final page, something had shifted—I could sense how clean sentences snap into place, the way a pianist’s fingers know where middle C lives without looking.
He continues on this path, comparing cognitive workload to resistance training:
When friction disappears, so does a hidden form of conditioning. Consider what happens when you remove resistance from any training: your muscles atrophy. The same principle applies to mental capabilities. Every hard task you delegate is a rep you didn’t do, a pattern your neurons didn’t carve deeper.
His thesis is that a barely literate country To borrow from Chat: He’s not just writing—he’s dropping knowledge bombs. Highlights:
Anyone can look capable; fewer people can be capable.
When everyone else’s focus fragments, mine compounds.
If you can think well, AI becomes a multiplier. If you can’t, AI just amplifies your mistakes.
The people who skipped the fundamentals become dependent on tools they don’t understand, producing work they can’t evaluate, making decisions based on outputs they can’t verify.
Absolutely worth reading, and maybe transcribing, whenever you’re tempted to take the path of least resistance.