Standing on shoulders

This is a quiet place for one idea at a time.

Every essay takes a single true thing I have come to believe about living, and sets a great book quietly behind it. Not a summary. Not a review. One idea, re-told so plainly that you can carry it out the door and use it the same afternoon.

The name comes from Isaac Newton. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. The ideas belong to the giants. What is mine is the choosing — which ideas I reach for, how I hold them up to the light, and the few places I think a great mind got something wrong. This is, as honestly as I can manage, how I see the world.

I write under one letter, J. Not to hide. Only to keep the work quiet. If we have spoken, and something here stays with you, that is the whole point.

— J.