TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

Here’s everything from July—the free essays you might have missed and what paid subscribers got behind the paywall.

Buckminster Fuller, the architect, systems theorist, inventor, philosopher, self-taught mathematician, futurist, the man who patented the geodesic dome, served as the second World President of MENSA and popularized the term "Spaceship Earth," started keeping track of everything he did, said, read, thought, and received and kept adding to the record every day after that for the rest of his life, until he died in 1983.

The project began because of an epiphany that told him his life didn’t belong to him—it belonged to the universe. His thoughts, he believed, were the truth, and not his feelings.

On one of those walks, in the autumn of 1927, he stopped at the edge of Lake Michigan and calculated how long it would take to for him to grow hypothermic and drown. His life insurance would pay out, and his wife and daughters would be provided for.

Standing on that shore at age 32, feeling like an absolute failure, suicide felt like the only responsible decision.

But as he stood there, on the precipice of ending his life, he felt briefly suspended above the ground, and he heard a voice in his head that said:

“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.^”

The conviction he felt from that thought marked the beginning of a life dedicated to replicating this sense of certainty by documenting the certainty of his existence.

He went home and told his wife Anne that he was done making decisions based on how he felt. He called it committing egocide: the death of the part of him that ran on feeling.

He said that he had to think, and would not utter a word until he knew what he truly thought. For two full years (or so he claimed) Fuller was silent. He filled five thousand pages with notes, in pursuit of the secret to success for the entire human race.

Fuller decided to make his life an experiment “to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”

“A small circle of colleagues and supporters afford me the great pleasure of coming to my house in the evening (8:30 p.m. after dinner) to discuss interesting topics in psychology and neuropathology....Would you be so kind as to join us?”

Upon his acceptance, Adler became one of the founding members of “The Wednesday Psychological Society” (later the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society), the room where modern psychology more or less began.

Ten years later, Alfred Adler walked out.

Freud told the story afterward as a betrayal, and history has mostly gone along with him. While Freud is the name everyone knows, Adler built out his psychology based on his disagreements with Freud, and it’s having a moment. Yet, most people living according to Adler’s ideas couldn't tell you where they came from.

Freud's model was built on the inside of a person: the subconscious, the split self, the idea that whatever was wrong with you was buried somewhere underneath and had to be dug up. The internal world captivated Freud, almost to the exclusion of external elements.

Adler, however, believed people were shaped by the web around them, family, friendship, work, the whole social fabric a person never actually exists apart from. He believed that everyone shared the need to belong and that personal problems were, in fact, interpersonal. He thought Freud overemphasized sex to explain human behavior.

Instead of looking at a person in isolation to understand their behavior, Adler saw people through their family system, friendships, societal roles, and culture. To understand a human being involved, consider the internal and external worlds together.

Adlerian psychology (also known as “Individual Psychology”) is the psychology of growth, where people strive to overcome difficulties and actually change their lives. Though his name may not be as well known as Freud and Carl Jung, Adler’s original ideas are embedded in modern practice.

Two Japanese psychotherapists, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, took Adler's psychology and turned it into a dialogue between a philosopher and a frustrated young student (which takes some getting used to) published as The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness. It came out in Japan in 2013 and it reveals how to apply Adlerian Individual psychology to contemporary life.

The english edition published in 2018, and has since sold over 13 million copies worldwide, almost outselling my own book, Little Panic: Dispatches from an anxious life.

Like many books, it became famous on TikTok.

Buried in the dialogue is a single question the philosopher keeps returning the student to. It’s a distillation of a concept Adler called the separation of tasks.

What that question opens up is either the most freeing idea to come out of pop psychology's raid on Adler, or the most convenient excuse anyone has built for not caring what people think of you.

Here’s the question:

📌 Friday Drops are for paid subscribers, and they feature something that caught my eye that I wanted to share.

On September 12, 2008, I was sitting with Colson Whitehead on a couch in a Brooklyn bar at an after-party for the Brooklyn Book Festival, when he leaned over to tell me that the author David Foster Wallace died.

I was devastated.

As the news spread through the room, I noticed an under-current of something resembling relief. The biggest talent of our generation, someone whose work seemed to tower over everyone else's, was suddenly off the board.

I remember the moment distinctly; how grotesque it felt, watching what I thought were people secretly reveling in the death of another writer. Until, moments later, I saw it differently.

It struck me as profoundly honest.

No one was celebrating a suicide. They weren’t reveling in his death. They were reacting to the impossible pressure of measuring themselves against someone who seemed incapable of writing a bad sentence. The relief was wasn’t about him; it was about them.

David Foster Wallace wasn't simply gifted; he was brilliant, prolific, and relentlessly inventive. His prose felt almost painfully alive, and Infinite Jest, a 1,079 page novel that permanently altered the landscape of contemporary American fiction, was only his sophomore effort.

The fact that he died by suicide haunted me. For months, I couldn't stop thinking about it. If someone that gifted, that admired, that seemingly indispensable could lose his battle with despair, what did that mean for the rest of us? What if it happened to me?

In the years that followed, another David Foster Wallace emerged.

His wife, the incredibly talented artist Karen Green, found his body. Stories surfaced about the ways he'd treated women, (specifically, the writer Mary Karr) revealing a man who could be cruel, manipulative, misogynistic and deeply flawed. More recently, as revelations about other celebrated male artists have accumulated, we've been forced to confront the same uncomfortable question again and again:

What do we do when the work is extraordinary but the person who made it isn't?

I've come to think they're two different conversations.

The art teaches us how to think, see, and make. The work deserves criticism on its own terms. The person deserves moral judgment on theirs. A novel can enlarge your life, while its author can still diminish other people's. One is aesthetic; the other is moral. The work deserves to be judged as art. The person deserves to be judged as a person.

We can appreciate a work of art and hold the person who made it accountable for their harms and failures as people. It’s hard, but it’s necessary, I think. If we want to learn. Bad people are capable of exquisite craft. Wallace’s grasp on literary craft was sui generous, and to study that won’t make you a bad person.

In other words, we don't have to excuse the person to learn from the work. We shouldn't, in fact, excuse the person. Confusing the two impoverishes both.

Which brings me to David Foster Wallace's 2003 course, SELECTED OBSCURE/ECLECTIC FICTIONS.

David Foster Wallace was an extraordinary reader of fiction and, by all accounts, a phenomenal teacher.

I wouldn't have wanted to date him. I probably wouldn't have wanted to be his friend. But I would have taken his class in a heartbeat.

So today I'm sharing the closest thing to taking it. It goes well beyond a syllabus, and includes the complete course packet: the reading list, assignments, grading philosophy, peer-review guidelines, student questionnaire, and the notes that framed the semester. If you've ever wondered what it would have been like to study literature with David Foster Wallace, this is probably the closest you'll ever get.

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

How often do we forget that our children are not us?

Even before we’ve conceived, we often imagine our children as idealized versions of ourselves.

Many of us are raised to follow the mold of our parents, to adhere to their chosen values and beliefs, because of some unspoken governing notion that what our parents believe is part of “the family system.”

But what happens when we are born in such a way that our physical appearance or identity alone belies the assumed facts our parents had for us, and goes against “the family system” of beliefs?

Why is it so difficult to accept differences in our children?

Andrew Solomon, one of my favorite thinkers and writers, explores this idea in his exceptional 2012 book about exceptional children Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.

“When we make a baby,” he writes, “we do not make ourselves as a baby as much as we have deluded ourselves into believing otherwise.”

He continues, unpacking the idea until it reverses itself with a universal truth often overlooked by parents (emphasis below is mine).

“Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to the environment, stimuli beyond our control. And yet, we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis.”

Yet, when our children are born with identities that do not resemble ours, when their preferences or abilities are foreign and unshared by their parents, and whose traits can only be found in groups outside their families, parents often flounder. The difference in their child becomes intolerably hard to grasp. And it’s no wonder. When we begin with the notion that our children are extensions of ourselves, their divergent identities throw us off, and many of us are left asking “Why me?”

These divergent identities, are ones not shared with the parents, and they can range from autism to dwarfism.

Solomon calls these unshared traits “horizontal identities.”

He distinguishes them from vertical identities, which are familiar to both parents and professionals.

Vertical identities are socially reinforced, highlighted, respected, and accepted. Vertical identities are passed down through genes and the environment.

They embody attributes like ethnicity, skin color, and language. Being born straight to straight parents is a vertical identity. Being born gay to straight parents is a horizontal identity.

And those born into horizontal identities are often subject to impulses that begin and end as perceived deficits their parents endeavor to fix.

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

About 75% of the population fear public speaking.

That’s roughly 3 out of 4 people!

The official term is Glossophobia, which apparently doesn’t mean fear of lip gloss but, translated literally from Greek, means: “fear of the tongue.”

Most people who've given presentations (or even toasts) know the specific squish of anticipatory dread; the terror of watching people watch you, the choking awareness onstage that you have no control over your own somatic responses. It's enough to make you swear off the whole enterprise, if you could.

Patrick Winston (February 5, 1943 – July 19, 2019) was a computer scientist and a celebrated professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who argued that the fear of public speaking stemmed from lacking skills. Anxiety, he believed, could be managed if a person understood the basic ground rules. (This is excellent advice for all aspects of anxiety.)

Every January, for over forty years, Winston gave a talk called “How to Speak.” Students who’d never taken his class began watching the recording online, telling others about it, until it racked up millions of views. All for a lecture on how to give a lecture.

His argument, roughly, is that good speaking is a formula. Knowledge plus practice plus talent, in that order, with talent doing the least amount of work. Which is a relief, if you think about it.

Below, I’m sharing the 1 hour and 3 minute video, and after the jump, I detail the exact techniques he covers, and how to put them into action.

For sensitive viewers: Winston often sounds winded, and for us super anxious folks, that can be hard to manage. (Hence, the transcript after the jump.)

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

In the late eighties and nineties, editor Gordon Lish (now 92) was a household name in contemporary literary fiction: cult figure, literary guru, polarizing teacher, mentor to a generation of literary phenoms, senior editor at Knopf, the man who discovered (among others) Raymond Carver, Ben Marcus, Amy Hempel, and Barry Hannah—and, depending on whom you ask, a scoundrel.

Fired from his teaching positions at Yale and Columbia, then later as an editor at Esquire and Knopf he went on to teach a private writing workshop out of his apartment. These grueling sessions would typically last six hours a session, without breaks. Yet, the workshop was so popular, the waiting list could reach into the low 100s.

He humiliated students in front of their peers as a matter of course, and cultivated what's been described, again and again, as a cult. But the process of ritual shame and hazing sounds more like a fraternity, with women.

Lish's editorial cuts were so deep his caustic snipping shaped the minimalist style Raymond Carver became known for. It wasn’t until decades later, when the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington bought Lish’s papers that Carver’s original drafts surfaced, and people saw the degree to which Raymond Carver’s original vision was influenced by Lish’s liberal Raymond-carving.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about David Foster Wallace, what surfaced about him after he died, and how to separate the art from the artist.

Lish, still living, was known for frequently sleeping with his female students, after instructing them to write in order to seduce him.

Sometimes Lish went on to acquire their work as an editor in the same stretch of time. He's confirmed at least one of these relationships himself, with the extraordinary Amy Hempel, calling it consensual and never secret. He's pushed back on the idea that it was a pattern. But multiple students and critics describe a workshop culture where erotic tension, professional gatekeeping, and power weren’t separate things.

It was a serious abuse of power over people whose careers depended on him liking them.

And then there’s my personal experience. Without yet knowing it, Lish also asked me to seduce him.

I’ll tell you that story after the jump.

Until next week, I will remain,