Wendy Wu

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on the atlas · 31

highlights · 44

Let the other person in. Don’t try to figure out the whole story from the first day. Open the windows, open the door. I swear, it’s safer than you think. It really is.
Advice To My 26-Year-Old Self
Your energy must go to what you desire, not what you dread.
Advice To My 26-Year-Old Self
Find things that are good for you, that aren’t work, romance, social life or shopping.
Advice To My 26-Year-Old Self
“The happily married,” Baum says, “are the ones who’ve simultaneously killed and reinforced the institution by making it suit themselves.”
Why We Need to Talk About Marriage | The New Yorker
Writing is writing is writing feels bad until it feels good. When I can’t write I read. When I can’t read I do the crossword. My other friend asked me, Do you ever worry that you’re not interesting? I do the crossword religiously every evening: I already know I’m boring.
a few book recommendations - by Ava - bookbear express
startups should move away from a “blended CAC” concept as soon as possible and attribute CAC by channel.
BlitzFail: How Not to Go Off the Rails | by David Sacks | Craft Ventures | Medium
Another rule of thumb is that LTV (the lifetime value of a customer) should be at least 3X CAC.
BlitzFail: How Not to Go Off the Rails | by David Sacks | Craft Ventures | Medium
Tesla got an interesting foothold because on another axis it really delivered. Yes, the range allowed for more commuting without having to charge twice a day, but more importantly, for the wealthy, it was a way to signal one's environmental consciousness in a package that was much, much sexier than the Prius, the previous electric car of choice of celebrities in LA.
Invisible asymptotes — Remains of the Day
we've spawned a whole bunch of CEO's who wear the same outfit every day and drive their design teams crazy with nitpick design feedback as if the outward trappings of the man were the essence of his skill.
Invisible asymptotes — Remains of the Day
In Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World, he discusses, among other things, redefining plot and rethinking Western story shapes: “Why, when the protagonist faces the world, does she need to win, lose, or draw? This is a Western idea of conflict. What if she understands herself as a part of that world, that world as a part of herself? What if she simply continues to live?”
Catapult | Writing an Ordinary Existence | Kyle Lucia Wu
Willa was too alone; it wasn’t believable for her to have no allies, no close friends. I was too embarrassed to say, But some people are that alone.
Catapult | Writing an Ordinary Existence | Kyle Lucia Wu
f you don’t care about plot, maybe you don’t see the world as cause and effect. Maybe the world doesn’t make sense to you in that way.
Catapult | Writing an Ordinary Existence | Kyle Lucia Wu
Maybe because all of the worst moments in my life seemed the most ordinary to everyone else, I was utterly unaware of how to make things happen in fiction
Catapult | Writing an Ordinary Existence | Kyle Lucia Wu
What’s special about her? I remember my mind becoming a lake, deliciously dark and deep with no ripples to speak of. There needs to be a reason to tell a story about her. You should be able to tell us, right away, what is special about her. She exists, I thought helplessly. And, I didn’t know she wasn’t special, that she had to be.
Catapult | Writing an Ordinary Existence | Kyle Lucia Wu
On January 1st of this year, like several January 1sts before it, I started a 30-day yoga challenge on YouTube.
#134: Big commitments loosely held - by Haley Nahman
There is a reason why they call the Grand Canyon the Inverted Mountain, why there are signs at the top that read going down is optional, going up is mandatory.
‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed’ - Longreads
from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: “Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”
01.27.23 - 15 things I consumed this week - by Haley Nahman
5-over-1s have come to symbolize, in tangible form, the most painful aspects of today’s housing crisis — stand-ins for gentrification, corporate landlords and excessively high rents.
Which City Are You In? As Housing Starts to Look the Same, It’s Hard to Tell - The New York Times
Are American cities destined to lose their unique charm? In the current housing crisis, does that matter?
Which City Are You In? As Housing Starts to Look the Same, It’s Hard to Tell - The New York Times
advocates for multifamily housing say there are times when design has to take a back seat to necessity, and an affordability crisis, exacerbated by inflation and brutally low housing inventory, is one of those times.
Which City Are You In? As Housing Starts to Look the Same, It’s Hard to Tell - The New York Times
I felt the invisible sigh of relief among the folks who had been hiking and climbing in Glacier for years. They knew how to engage with these mountains. These mountains would let them live.
‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed’ - Longreads
design heads who make their entire personality about owning Dieter Rams objects and Leica cameras.
Life After Lifestyle
Lifestyle brands and DTC needed to draw on these subcultural elements—they needed to be the products people buy in order to participate
Life After Lifestyle
culture becomes part of your identity: you learn to use the language, you read the community lore online, you post photos with the same aesthetic, and you know you’re “fitting in” when you start to get reblogs
Life After Lifestyle
Cultures have their own language, objects, and knowledge; their own stories, aesthetics, practices, people, and places that all make sense together in a coherent way. They have behaviors they condone and reward, and behaviors they deem unworthy. And each has its own moral sensibility
Life After Lifestyle
aesthetic dissonance.
Dumb and shameful until it's not - by Ryan Broderick
fascinating example of the limits of relatability and aspirational content. The end result is that the users doing this are sort of neither. Their lives look joyless and sad, but also deeply privileged and out of touch.
Dumb and shameful until it's not - by Ryan Broderick
“Based on her last video she basically ‘worked’ in an adult day care in an overpriced airplane hanger and had juice boxes. I’m shocked she got laid off.”
Dumb and shameful until it's not - by Ryan Broderick
at least when it comes to online platforms, journalists both believe that they are an identity and act like they’re a community, but also refuse to see themselves as an online subculture with its own specific and subjective point of view.
Dumb and shameful until it's not - by Ryan Broderick
Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.
Dumb and shameful until it's not - by Ryan Broderick
internet politics are driven not by what’s most important or even morally right, but by whatever’s easiest and most entertaining to do on social platforms
The "Scooby Doo" psyop - by Ryan Broderick - Garbage Day
“Sacrificial trash” is a piece of media that tries to pander to young audiences with woke identity politics to cover up how mediocre it is, which, in turn, creates a chaotic feedback loop of online discourse.
The "Scooby Doo" psyop - by Ryan Broderick - Garbage Day
How uniquely are we developing a personal point of view—a personal approach—a personal set of “eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors” that will uniquely prepare us to create?
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck
How flexible and aggressive are we at synthesizing—at linking together multiple, disparate, apparently unrelated experiences on the fly?
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck
In a highly uncertain world, a bias to action is key to catalyzing success, and luck, and is often to be preferred to thinking things through more throughly.
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck
Curious people are more likely to already have in their heads the building blocks for crafting a solution for any particular problem they come across, versus the more quote-unquote intelligent, but less curious, person who is trying to get by on logic and pure intellectual effort.
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck
I nodded. But the right words wouldn't come out. It was always that way. Whenever I was with him the words just wouldn't flow.
Barn Burning, by Haruki Murakami
Meticulous and logical. But you must have overlooked it. That happens sometimes. A thing's too close, and you miss it.
Barn Burning, by Haruki Murakami
"I don't judge anything. The barns are waiting to be burned. I just accept that. I merely accept what's there. It's like the rain. The rain falls. The river swells up. Something gets carried away in the flow. Is the rain making a judgment? It's not like I'm out to commit an immoral act. I have my own code of morality.”
Barn Burning, by Haruki Murakami
Writers are supposed to appreciate something for what it is, before they hand down a judgment.
Barn Burning, by Haruki Murakami
no one would ever think that a welldressed young man driving an expensive foreign car would be running around torching barns
Barn Burning, by Haruki Murakami
HE WAS USING THE MOUSE!! …“WTF?!”
The Shitshow : The Leveraged Sell-Out
At the risk of becoming Mr. and Mrs. Intense, we directed dinnertime chats with friends away from trivialities like vacation plans and house purchases, and toward issues of happiness, love, and spirituality. This deepened some of our friendships, and in other cases showed us that a more fulfilling relationship wasn’t going to be possible—and, thus, where to put less energy.
How to Make Your Friendships Deeper - The Atlantic
deal friendships—those at the lowest level on Aristotle’s ladder—are less satisfying. They feel incomplete because they don’t involve the whole self.
How to Make Your Friendships Deeper - The Atlantic