Call Them Rationalists - by Ben Steinhorn - Befriendjamin

Last week I had dinner with Lemony Snicket. I didn’t realize who I was sitting with at the time, and said very little to him that night. But another writer at that table gave me some advice I had already known (which only further cemented it as advice worth taking). He’d just returned from South Africa, where he had interviewed a certain Nobel Laureate, and had stopped in San Francisco to give a reading. He was exhausted, and the advice came out in an offhand, casual way, after I told him about the residency I was attending. His advice was this: to write down everything. Especially if you are in a strange place. I am in a strange place. But I am also strange myself, and often feel like an alien. My father is a mathematician (a field where strangeness is a boon), and I majored in mathematics as well. But a serious illness derailed my life and forced me to look closely at what I actually wanted to do with the time left to me. I saw the books I had read and loved so deeply, the books that

Last week I had dinner with Lemony Snicket. I didn’t realize who I was sitting with at the time, and said very little to him that night. But another writer at that table gave me some advice I had already known (which only further cemented it as advice worth taking). He’d just returned from South Africa, where he had interviewed a certain Nobel Laureate, and had stopped in San Francisco to give a reading. He was exhausted, and the advice came out in an offhand, casual way, after I told him about the residency I was attending. His advice was this: to write down everything. Especially if you are