Ashley Zhang: Baldwin Interview, Straussian Moment, Quit Your Job, Whole Earth, Inner Landscape of Beauty
Our curator this week is Ashley Zhang (@ashleydzhang). Ashley writes Letters from a Luftmensch, a Substack exploring human flourishing in the age of AI. Her interest in flourishing began as an effort to understand despair—and has evolved into a pursuit of the beautiful, good, and true. She investigates how humans can live fully and freely alongside intelligent machines.
Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Ashley.
Ashley's Picks
James Baldwin, The Paris Review Interview
Think of any iconic literary figure of the last century, and they'll probably have an interview in The Paris Review. It's hard to pick a favorite, but I return to Baldwin's, Simone de Beauvoir's, and Vladimir Nabokov's quite often.
The Straussian Moment
Thiel crafts a theory of liberalism for our post-9/11 world, and raises questions of the implications of our loss of faith in human reason.
Quit Your Job
A rousing call to leap off the beaten path, and a reminder of the importance of leisure in an authentic, creative, ambitious life.
Whole Earth Index
The Whole Earth Catalogs were defining artifacts of the 1960s counterculture movement and Silicon Valley's maverick, do-it-yourself ethos. They've recently been digitized and collected in this archive.
Notes on Taste
Taste is an uncommon virtue and a notoriously difficult concept to articulate. Brie's essay, modeled after Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp," is the best distillation of it that I've encountered.
Go gentle into that good night
Film critic Roger Ebert penned this essay on life, love, and death just a few years before his own passing. It's a touching reflection on life's biggest questions.
John O'Donohue: The Inner Landscape of Beauty
A beautiful reminder from Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue about the necessity of beauty in a full human life.
David Foster Wallace on Ambition
This sentence has haunted me since I first heard it: "Perfectionism is dangerous because if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything — you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is."
Spotlight on Ashley's Work
Letters from Luftmensch
Ashley's Substack, featuring lovely little missives about Wendell Berry, George Saunders, Emerson, Mary Oliver, and more.
Building Babel
Ashley's essay for Can You Imagine? – a beautiful 12 page timeline from the pre-literate era to present day.