Press & Blog

Interpol’s new title track asks what we do with a mirror that weighs a ton. This essay reads it as a spiritual question: is silence the end of feeling or the far side of it? Drawing on my own experience of sitting with a loss I could not go around, and on what I tell my students about shortcuts, it makes the case that the silence you buy and the silence you go through are not the same.

What does it mean to ask if you must evolve? A close reading of the question behind the podcast — three words and a punctuation mark that refuse to settle. Drawing on Zen Buddhism, yoga, and contemplative practice, this essay unpacks the strange grammar of personal transformation: the inherited weight of must, the shifting self of I, the optimization trap of evolve, and the small refusal hiding in the question mark itself. A meditation on identity, change, and the quiet work

I didn't set out to write novels about mental health. I set out to write about people — broken, searching, stubbornly human people. But somewhere in the process of writing Ian in Waiting Impatiently and then again in Invisible Sun, I realized I was writing about the same thing: what happens inside a person when things don't go as planned, and the weight of living becomes almost too much to carry.

Punk rock got there first. At seventeen, I wanted to be a singer and had no words, so my brother told me to read everything and never stop. Seven books that stuck.