George Saunders wrote the book about writing I didn't know I needed. It is less about craft and more about attention -- the kind of attention that changes how you see a room, a sentence, a person standing in the rain. Each chapter unwraps a Russian short story the way you might unwrap a ceramic piece from tissue paper: carefully, with reverence, knowing something fragile and true is inside. I have returned to it four times now, and each time I find a new crack that lets the light in.
march 2026 — sincerely
restaurant
The Flour Pot Bakery, Brighton
There is a sourdough loaf here that tastes the way morning light looks when it comes through kitchen curtains. The crust shatters like thin ice and the crumb inside is soft and slightly sour and perfect with nothing but butter and salt. I sat at a wooden table by the window and watched the baker's hands move through dough with the same patient rhythm as a potter centering clay. Some places feed you. This one nourishes.
february 2026 — warmly
album
Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & the LSO
Nine movements. One synthesizer note that blooms like a kiln opening. Pharoah Sanders' saxophone enters like a voice you haven't heard in years but recognize immediately. The London Symphony Orchestra swells beneath it all, patient and vast. This is not background music. This is music that asks you to sit down, close your eyes, and let something very old and very beautiful move through you. I listened to it on a train through the countryside and cried, which I think is exactly what it was made for.
january 2026 — sincerely
object
A Handmade Yunomi from Mashiko
My friend brought this back from Tochigi Prefecture. It is a tea cup with no handle, slightly asymmetric, glazed in a color that shifts between ash grey and pale blue depending on the light. The potter left a thumbprint in the base, and every morning when I wrap my hands around it, I feel that print against my palm. It is the most intimate object I own. It reminds me that someone made this for someone, and somehow it found its way to me. The tea tastes better for it. Everything does.
december 2025 — warmly
place
The Reading Room at the Bodleian
Not the famous Duke Humfrey's Library, though that is magnificent too. I mean the Radcliffe Camera reading room -- the circular one, where the desks radiate outward from the center like the chambers of a nautilus shell. You sit beneath a dome that was old when your grandparents' grandparents were born, and somehow the silence here is different from other silences. It is a silence that has been shaped by centuries of concentration. You can feel it pressing gently against your skin, asking you to be worthy of it.