Henrik Karlsson: Love Stories, A Child's Plaything, Understory, Knausgaard, Bliss
Our curator this week is Henrik Karlsson (@phokarlsson). Henrik writes Escaping Flatland, a Substack about relationships, thinking, and agency with over 45,000 subscribers. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a programmer, poet, factory worker, teacher, and lab technician. He lives on a small, pine-covered island in the Baltic Sea with his wife Johanna, who collaborates on much of his writing—they're currently about 10,000 hours into their conversation.
Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Henrik.
Henrik's Picks
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor
One of the great intellectual love stories is that between John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, the married woman Mill corresponded with for twenty years, ascribed his best ideas to, and married in old age. Not to give away too much: but their end is the kind of stuff that practices your tear canal.
A Child's Plaything
Toby Ord's micro essay, 114 words long, manages to say more interesting things than most writers do in a full year's worth of blog posts.
The Understory
An essay that centers on an excursion in the woods that Robert Macfarlane takes with the fungal researcher Merlin Sheldrake. Beautiful nature writing coupled with interesting discussions about the interrelations in the forest and the limitations in trying to reduce those relationships to the political categories of human beings—and much more.
Karl Ove Knausgaard on Ingmar Bergman's workbooks
The film director Ingmar Bergman kept a sprawling workbook for more than 30 years of his life. There he would riff in a totally unhinged and uncensored way to lure out images from himself. When it was published in Swedish a few years ago, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote this insightful introduction. The workbooks have sadly not been translated into English yet, but the introduction has.
Manufacturing Bliss
This is my favorite recent piece. After I listened to it, I went to put our six-year-old to sleep and while laying there, I tried what Nadia Asparouhova covers in the piece and after 40 minutes had one of the most intense feelings of bliss I've ever experienced. Quite surreal.
The Evaporative Cooling Effect
Time moves at a different rate online. If I read a blog post from 2010, it feels like climbing down into a prehistoric crypt. Especially when, as in this case, it is only preserved as a snapshot on the internet archive. But this one, by Hang, is worth the climb to get a feel for the commentary around social networks from the era when they first took shape. This one is deeply insightful about the dynamics of social groups, how they degrade with scale, and what to do about it.
Monkey and Bear
While technically a piece of harp music, this is one of the better lyrical essays of the 2000s. Reading the lyrics to songs is rarely a pleasant experience, but in Joanna Newsom's case, the words have rich—and deeply layered—meaning. On agency, autonomy, and false peddlers of freedom.
Spotlight on Henrik's Work
Henrik has written multiple Staff Picks and fan favorites, including: