Truth or Dare - by Duncan Sabien - Homo Sabiens

Structural note: Some essays are like a five-minute morning news spot. Other essays are more like a 90-minute lecture. This is one of the latter. It’s not necessarily complex or difficult; it could be a 90-minute lecture to seventh graders (especially ones with the right cultural background). But this is, inescapably, a long-form piece, à la In Defense of Punch Bug or The MTG Color Wheel. It takes its time. It doesn’t apologize for its meandering (outside of this disclaimer). It asks you to sink deeply into a gestalt, to drift back and forth between seemingly unrelated concepts until you start to feel the way those concepts weave together, rather than just abstractly summarizing the interactions between them. (There’s a big difference between the type of hike where you are trying to get from point A to point B, and the type of hike where the whole point is to embed yourself into the territory and be somewhere for a while. To let being-in-that-place do to you whatever it ends up doing.)

Structural note: Some essays are like a five-minute morning news spot. Other essays are more like a 90-minute lecture. This is one of the latter. It’s not necessarily complex or difficult; it could be a 90-minute lecture to seventh graders (especially ones with the right cultural background). But this is, inescapably, a long-form piece, à la In Defense of Punch Bug or The MTG Color Wheel. It takes its time. It doesn’t apologize for its meandering (outside of this disclaimer). It asks you to sink deeply into a gestalt, to drift back and forth between seemingly unrelated concepts until you start